Re: Time to move GGV to the Attic?

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

On 7/18/06, Andreas J. Guelzow <aguelzow taliesin ca> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-17-07 at 17:23 -0400, Tomislav Vujec wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-07-17 at 11:34 -0600, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
> > > Having not seen a single code change in a year can be a _good_thing!
> > > I prefer the look and feel of evince but find myself frequently using
> > > ggv because evince can't handle things correctly. SO implying that an
> > > "actively developed" program is necessarily better for the users is
> > > ridiculous!
> >
> > I agree. But I don't think that anyone is suggesting that evince is
> > better than GGV because it is being actively developed. GGV is not being
> > _maintained_, therefore no one is doing any source code modification,
> > therefore it doesn't need an active source code repository.
> >
> > However, since someone might want to pick it up in the future, it is
> > being _archived_, not _removed_.
> >
> > I am sorry, but I just can't see how's your protesting against
> > _archival_ of GGV going to help either Evince or GGV? Or did you miss
> > the point?
>
> I don't think I missed the point. From the practical point of source
> maintenance there is no reason to oppose archive ggv. I am worried about
> the signal this sends to packagers though: GNOME considers ggv outdated
> and it should not be distributed anymore.

What packagers do and don't do is beyond our control, really, and I'm
certain all of them would come to the same conclusion anyway: This
piece of software is not maintained anymore. What we're doing by
moving it to the archive is making it more obvious that it isn't
maintained, since that's the information that packagers and
distributors are usually most concerned about.
The actual location of the module is usually not a concern. Whether it
is maintained or not always is a concern.


> >  There are just too many
> > modules in the gnome CVS to be able to navigate it in any useful way,
> > and keeping inactive projects there is not helping anyone.
>
> How do you navigate in Gnome CVS? I have never found the existence of
> modules that I am not interested in as hindering me in finding what I am
> looking for.

There are many contributors that work cross-repository, and contribute
to many (and by that I mean many) different modules at the same time.
This can be testers, docs writers, and many translators. As a
translator, I have myself contributed to at least 342 unique modules
in GNOME cvs (data from a fresh grep), so navigating becomes quite
clearly an issue.

When I translate, I don't want to spend hours or days translating
something, when in the end the translation will never end up being
used. This happens when you translate non-maintained module by mistake
-- since it's not maintained, noone will ever roll a new tarball that
contains your work. That really sucks, and has happened enough times
in the past that I want it to never happen again.

I also do not want to have to spend hours or days digging through mail
archives and getting answers from the original authors of every single
module to find out whether the module is still maintained or not,
before I start translating it. I want to be able to assume that it is
maintained, dive in, do my work, and do it in as little time as
possible, so that I can attend other modules as well.

And since translations are to be kept updated and I cannot keep track
of the maintainedness status for 342 different modules in my head, I
want the maintainedness status to be immediately obvious the next time
as well when I visit the module, in order to know if it's worth any
effort to update the translation.
And then there's a couple of hundred other translators like me, who
also want to have this information at their fingertips.

As a logical consequence, I think our archive section in the
repository is terrific -- since we have the archive and put
non-maintained modules there as long as they're not maintained, I and
hundreds of other contributors can assume that everything that is in
our regular section is maintained. This simplifies life quite a bit.


> Of course I realize that it already has been moved so I am really just
> wasting everybody's time.

Yes.


Christian