Re: "mc is over!?" - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site

[Paul Sokolovsky <pmiscml gmail com>]

Hello,

On Wed, 27 May 2015 22:28:15 +0200
"Yury V. Zaytsev" <yury shurup com> wrote:

[]

> As I have pointed out, the biggest problem is getting someone to
> invest at least 20 hours per week in the maintenance. 

Not going to happen. If you guys spent that amount of time on it, good
for you, and kudos. Anyone else would work on getting maintainership
and codebase under control to get more stable and sustainable results,
instead of wasting 20 hours a week. 

> No matter how
> annoying Trac is, so far, the bottleneck has been the time to review
> the patches, as in read & think, not post the results of the review
> to the Trac.

Trac is old and unmaintainable. There are 8 pull requests and 21 bugs
open on github. Over last month, 2 PR were merged, 0 new submitted, 0
issues reported:
https://github.com/MidnightCommander/mc/pulse/monthly . Tell anyone
about 20 hrs per week maintenance.

> > Other people gave early warnings that not everything is right with
> > project maintainership, 
>
> I would have been delighted if those well-wishers would have actually
> done something more substantial than just wasting my time on the
> mailing lists.
>
> For example, one could have set up a script to import Trac tickets
> into Github Issues. There are many half-way working scripts floating
> around, but they need testing and fixing. Last time, Savannah import
> into Trac took quite some effort, but it turned out to be very
> worthwhile.

You again trying to over-complicate. Start from a clean page on github,
while invite community to migrate issues from trac to github. Most
content on trac from people who gave up on mc long ago. It makes sense
to process what active people are interested in and leave old stuff
where it is.

> Yet, I recognize that it's always easier to lay out great plans on the
> mailing list and demand somebody else to implement them. Right?
>
> > so one can only guess why it's unexpected to you.
>
> If you knew that Andrew is going to be transferred to another
> department you could have let me and others know in advance, but for
> one reason or another, you didn't, and I'm not the one to blame for
> it.

No, it's not like that. It's just doesn't make much sense to work on
something while ignoring other users, giving ~0 response, etc. Sooner
or later, a thought "WTF I'm doing this at all?" comes to mind. 

> > > I have personally publicly asked Egmont to take over the
> > > maintaintership multiple times, however, he is understandably
> > > reluctant to do so, and no one can force him to do it, if he
> > > doesn't want to. It's his decision.
> >
> > Perhaps it should be done step by step, while simplifying
> > "infrastructure". Initial steps are very easy:
>
> Thanks for writing this up, except that it's pretty obvious anyways;
> now, who is going to get all of this done?
>
> Are you volunteering for it, or I have misunderstood your intentions?

I have couple of my patches accepted into mc (trivial, yes, it's on a
non-trivial thing I stuck due to lack of discussion), so pass one
criteria I myself proposed. My maintainership program would be:

1. Tear off all the unmaintainable code.

2. Once enough code is removed, accept Mooffie's scripting patch under
condition that it includes plugin management features - both
interactive UI and "batch" mode, e.g. to install all your favorite
plugins in one step on a new mc install.

3. Require patches with good descriptions (including references), try
to respond to pull requests quickly with suggestion, close those
which weren't got into shape in 1 month as unmaintainable.

4. I'd need another maintainer: 1) who thinks that such approach makes
sense; 2) to have 2nd opinion on proposed actions.


If current maintainers think that such program would be acceptable,
feel free to count me in as a candidate, to be reviewed for
compatibility with other candidates' programs. The whole
selection process should take 1-2 weeks max.



And, btw, can current github committers be enumerated please? I based
a maintainer list in the original mail based on "Midnight Commander"
org on github: https://github.com/MidnightCommander . It doesn't
include you, Yury, so I didn't addressed to you, sorry. I assume you
have commit access. I also see that https://github.com/ciampix commits
and merges pull requests from time to time, and I see few posts of him
in my local mailing lists archive (since 2013-09). What's his role, and
how we can get him into the current discussion? (And how to set up the
process that maintainers communicate on the mailing list, which is
easily accessible to general public, while is least-effort option
(respond when you have time, not right away like jabber, irc, etc.))  

> -- 
> Sincerely yours,
> Yury V. Zaytsev



-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                          mailto:pmiscml gmail com