Re: CVS accounts/policy [was Re: Minutes of the GNOME Found...]

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu> writes:

> 
> This is a big problem.  While many people ask the right people and get
> accounts right away, other people have to wait a very long time and
> sometimes never get CVS access when they should.  There is a widespread
> impression that Miguel is the person who gives out CVS accounts and
> (before it opened up) gnome-hackers entry.  I have heard many people
> complain that their emails to get onto gnome-hackers or CVS accounts went
> unanswered for weeks.  Based on quite a few people I have spoken to, few
> people ever get accounts from Miguel and it takes them a long time to
> discover that other people can give out accounts.
> 
> One of the maintainers of a GNOME application in GNOME CVS recently
> explained to me that he was moving his application out of GNOME CVS and
> onto SourceForge because he had too much difficulty getting GNOME CVS
> accounts for new contributors to his module.  I see this as further
> evidence that we have a serious problem with how we give out CVS accounts
> right now.
> 

Dan, please point him to me or Martin or <cvsmaster gnome org> if he
hasn't quite made the move yet, those are ways to reach people that
are pretty responsive about setting up accounts.

> We really need to set up a policy for CVS accounts.  We need:
> 
> 1) a public list of people who are responsible for giving out accounts
> 
> 2) a public description of the procedure by which one applies for a CVS
> account
> 
> 3) a public description of the criteria the CVS committee (ie. the
> people who give out the accounts) use to determine if an account should be
> granted
> 
> 4) a system for communicating CVS etiquette, responsibility, and
> permissions to new CVS users.  A good web page and/or an email from the
> project coordinator or CVS account granter should explain what the new
> account holder is allowed to do in CVS and what they are not allowed to
> do.  Good communication is much better than ACL's unless you expect people
> to act maliciously, which has not occured with GNOME to my knowledge.
> 
> 5) If we formalize this into a committee, then we should probably set up
> an alias such as cvs gnome org which forwards to everybody who can give
> out CVS access.  Then anybody who wants to apply for a CVS account can
> email cvs gnome org and hopefully one of the people who can give out
> accounts will respond in a timely manner.  (Is this what
> cvsmaster gnome org is for?)
> 
> 6) Put up a web page which holds all the "public" information above
> 
> Most of this is modelled after what we did or plan to do with the GF
> Membership Committee which seems to have worked rather well.
> 

Dan, this sounds like a great plan. Can you ask the board to put this
on the agenda for a future meeting?

 - Maciej