Re: New suites vs. common release cycle [Was: Productivity suite]

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

msevior physics unimelb edu au wrote:

> [background to AbiWord-devs]
>
> GNOME would like us to host our CVS ON THE GNOME-cvs (or superceeded
> system)server
>
>
>
>
>  
>
> > ons 2005-06-15 klockan 12:16 +1000 skrev Martin Sevior:
> >    
> >
> > > On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 00:08 +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> > >      
> > >
> > > > Judging from my own experience, not many users complain that each and
> > > > every application out there isn't released as part of GNOME. They
> > > >        
> > > don't
> > >      
> > >
> > > > know what GNOME is; they basically just got their distro and whatever
> > > > applications it included by default. For these users, what we
> > > >        
> > > officially
> > >      
> > >
> > > > include in GNOME and what we don't wouldn't change a thing, as they
> > > >        
> > > get
> > >      
> > >
> > > > all the applications anyway as part of the distro.
> > > >
> > > > But from the users that actually know what GNOME is, I have received
> > > > nothing but positive feedback in terms of how the user experience of
> > > > consistency and integration has improved through the latest releases.
> > > > So, at least to me it seems strange that we should intentionally start
> > > > going in the opposite direction, and as a consequence be diluting our
> > > > brand name (for those who know the difference) for no obvious reason.
> > > >        
> > > Well a lot of this is speaking in the abstract saying if we do this then
> > > we need to do that.
> > >
> > > Rather than speaking in the abstract why not address what GNOME would
> > > get (or what GNOME would lose) by including AbiWord in it's release.
> > >
> > > You can apply the same criteria to any other application that wishes to
> > > be included.
> > >
> > > From my own biased view point here is what GNOME gets from AbiWord:
> > >      
> > [...snip many good stuff about Abiword that I think most people are
> > already aware of...]
> >
> > I beleive Abiword is an excellent application, and if these issues were
> > properly resolved, I would be all for it being officially listed as part
> > of the Productivity Suite (or perhaps even the Desktop release).
> >
> > However, a big part of GNOME's success is having a consistent desktop.
> > An important part of that is allowing all contributors to easily
> > contribute to all parts of the desktop (given permission of course). If
> > people can directly fix small but annoying problems that they encounter,
> > problems that would otherwise had required a lot of administrativia to
> > get fixed, then that means a lot of fixing for free that would otherwise
> > simply not happen. That single aspect has meant an enormous boost to the
> > amount of contributions. I bet you can ask any GNOME maintainer out
> > there about the level of amount of good contributions that they've
> > received in CVS from other GNOME contributors; contributors that they
> > would not always have expected wanting to contribute to their
> > application.
> >
> > And to cross-project efforts such as the GNOME Translation Project, easy
> > access to all modules is not just a nice thing to have, but a real hard
> > requirement. And up to this point and Jeff's announcement, it has been a
> > requirement, for all modules part of the release and needing
> > translations, to be hosted in the same CVS as everything else, for very
> > obvious reasons.
> >
> >    
>
> Ah interesting. I didn't realize people did direct contributions into
> other projects without asking permission.
>
> I think I would definately have a problem with this :-( We've seen a
> number of well-meaning patches with with nasty side-effects in AbiWord.
>  
Hi Martin:

You may want to re-read the thread and note the words "given permission, 
of course".  The intention was to say that cvs commits from outside the 
project do require permission from maintainers.  There are usually only 
two exceptions to this: translations, and "build sheriff" fixes.  "Build 
sheriffs" are folks who look after the GNOME build and fix anything that 
breaks the build.  If you aren't comfortable with the build sheriff 
policy, you can indicate "no 'build sheriff' commits" in your cvs 
HACKING file.

regards

Bill

> Regarding translations, this is definately a culture-change but it it
> clearly time to air this on the AbiWord mailing list.
>
> I'll CC this reply to the abiworl-ml to get their input.
>
> Cheers
>
> PS. I'm on holiday at Surfers Paradise, typing from an internet cafe so my
> reponses might be a bit infrequent.
>  
>
> > Christian
> >
> >
> >    
>
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>
>  

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