[Opensim-dev] The notion of "core"

[Kyle]

Well said especially the "much love"-if we see far it is because we  
stand on the shoulders of virtual giants...

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On Oct 20, 2009, at 12:32 AM, Ryan McDougall <sempuki1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 2:49 AM, Frisby, Adam  
> <adam at deepthink.com.au> wrote:
>> Ter pretty much summed it up - both it and the irc channel are  
>> fairly low-volume, and the 'topic' is restricted to only 'personal'  
>> or 'meta' matters; such as discussion of approval of commit rights.
>>
>> It's pretty standard practice across open source projects with more  
>> than 5 committers for the committers to have a mailing list for  
>> these purposes, since realtime chats aren't practical across  
>> timezones.
>>
>> Adam
>>
>
> I am not sure I'd agree just how standard a process it is.
>
> The one's I've been involved with or otherwise have some detailed
> knowledge of, have never had them; including such big names as GNOME,
> Fedora, and Linux. For example the GNOME foundation list is not only
> world-readable, but anyone can join:
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list . Actual
> foundation members are voted by the community at large.
>
> Basically the way they are able to operate is, they don't distribute
> commit access according to monolithic vote of knighted members; they
> have a system of maintainership, and each maintainer gives access
> rights to his module/repo as she sees fit, in a web of trust.
>
> One of the complaints one sometimes hears is how monolithic the
> project is (even if the code-base is modular). Maybe the move to git,
> and the maturation of the code allows more distribution and
> specialization of responsibility?
>
> My concerns with core mailing list are:
>
> 1. It's "secret", ie. not world readable. I can understand limiting
> membership to voting partners to avoid bikeshedding, but I can't
> understand secrecy of any kind in an open source project.
>
> 2. Decisions made there (aside from commit rights) affect other
> people, and they not only have no voice to represent themselves, they
> don't even get to know what is being said about them. That doesn't
> seem fair somehow.
>
> The knowledge that someone can read what you write makes you think
> harder about what you say. Maybe a private list makes the problem of
> disagreement within core worse rather than better? I haven't the
> faintest idea who this snowcrash guy is, but when I was a topic of
> discussion on -core, I remember not liking it at all.
>
> As for the issue of timezones, I understand that completely! Which is
> why I wish you guys used ML more frequently! :)
>
> My intention is not to bike-shed, but to be productive. Either opensim
> core is open to this point of view or it's not, and we move on from
> there.
>
> Cheers, and much love!
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