Re: Can we improve things?

[Olav Vitters <olav bkor dhs org>]

On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 11:19:49PM +0200, Damien Sandras wrote:
> You probably know that I started contributing to GNOME in my spare time
> back in 2000. I have dedicated countless hours to my project,
> GnomeMeeting, now known as Ekiga. It means 7 years of development,
> exclusively done during evenings, nights and week-ends. Ekiga was
> the first videoconferencing application available for the Linux desktop,
> and it is nowadays still one of the best Open Source SIP softphones.

I appreciate you and every GNOME dev/translator/triager/contributor.

> However, I am more and more disappointed by the way some people
> *control* that community, even if they never contributed anything back
> to it.

As someone who can create SVN accounts (due to being a sysadmin.. I
never intended to setup SVN accounts.. only started due to a backlog):
It is not about controlling/ denying. It is regarding the stupid setup
we have that is the SVN creation process and lack of people helping
(partly my fault.. still have to grant someone those abilities). 

This should improve with the new account system that is still being
worked on. It'll provide transparency, etc. I hope it will be live in <1
month.

> When I think to Matthias, I am getting mad. 
> Matthias requested an SVN account several months ago, and never got one.
> When he went on IRC to ask for the account activation, people replied to
> him that he had to make a new request and wait. One month later, the

Ping more often.

I hate the current process so much that I'd rather drive a nail through
my head than to actively setup SVN accounts. I've had it after doing it
for a few months. Either I can spend time on the backlog that is always
there, or fix the problem. I've resorted to fixing the problem.
Regarding the requested SVN account..  I have no qualms regarding
tricking others to do the nasty bits.

> account is not active yet. Matthias has been contributing thousands of
> lines of code to Ekiga since several months, and I still need to commit
> his patches myself. This is inadmissible.
> 
> When I think to Julien, I am also getting mad.
> He has been contributing to Ekiga for 5 years. He recently created a
> blog and asked to Jeff to be added on planet.gnome.org. He was first

My comments are solely regarding account creation. IMO we should use
Bugzilla for to log p.g.o requests.

> I just wanted to express my opinion, in the hope that something can be
> done to improve the situation.

I hope it'll be solved with the new accounts system.


Sorry.. short answer as I am very tired and need to sleep soon.
-- 
Regards,
Olav