Re: gnome.org Account Policies

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc linuxweasel com>]

Please trim your messages to only include the enough to get context, no
need to keep repeating ourselves...

On 21 Aug 2001 22:56:28 +0200, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> Are we really 725 active hackers?
> 
> I think that some of those accounts could be closed if they are not used
> any more...

I'm certain that not all of these accounts are used on a regular basis.
This spring, I did a great deal of "spring cleaning" on the CVS
database, and disabled quite a few accounts.  

> El d_ 21 Aug 2001 21:33:22 +0100, Sander Vesik escribi_
> > 
> > Actually, having a corresponding @gnome.org address for each cvs account
> > might be a good idea - you would always know where to send compalining
> > emails when you see a realy broken commit go to the tree...

FYI, every user in the current CVS database has an email address
associated with it, as well as a Full Name (I think, haven't checked in
a while).  I don't know if or how "normal" people can get access to
this, but everyone who reads the cvsmaster gnome org mailing list has
access to get this information.  

OK, I just checked, full names aren't associated with all of the CVS
accounts, just most of them.  I don't feel like hunting these people
down right now to find out who they are, so I'll leave it be.

If people included valid, working email addresses as part of their
commit message, I think that @gnome.org aliases for cvs users would be a
lot less useful.  I'm not sure if we can count on that or not, as I've
seen several commits lately that were made with broken email aliases.  I
guess I need to think about this one some more.

> > On 21 Aug 2001, Owen Taylor wrote:
[snip]
> > > Note that the number of people with CVS accounts (725) is considerably
> > > bigger than the number of GNOME foundation members (373), and we have
> > > a considerably more formal process for foundation membership than
> > > getting a CVS account. (Even with this new policy, CVS accounts basicically
> > > given ou "if you need one")
> > [snip]

There are certainly quite a few people with CVS accounts who aren't
GNOME Foundation members, and don't really meet the criteria, as I
understand them.  I don't know how to feel about this.  They're using
our servers, but aren't really working on GNOME stuff...  But, since
some GNOME things are very cross-platform, and each module has a fairly
small thing that it's trying to accomplish, I can see where people might
want to hack on a specific module for their own purposes, but not really
be concerned with the rest of GNOME.  This isn't really a problem,
unless a module becomes maintained by somebody who is going to take it
off in their own direction, regardless of what impact that has on the
rest of the GNOME community. This would be a bad thing, but it's
probably something that we can just watch out for, rather than cutting
off people who are writing good code just because they don't care what
the rest of GNOME is doing.
	Greg