-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sonntag, 27. April 2003 03:32, Daniel Stone wrote: > On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 02:21:15AM +1000, Mark Constable wrote: > > On Sun, 27 Apr 2003 01:00 am, Daniel Stone wrote: > > > On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 12:21:40AM +1000, Mark Constable wrote:
> > Other large systems also require major input. If it's ben left to an > > individual with a large itch to scratch then I do suspect something > > political about this situation. > > Not really. Ivan did it almost entirely on his own, and gradually shed > packages. Ben B and Daniel Schepler picked up some of the packages, and > I picked up roughly half of the application packages. He burnt out and > left, and I picked up the rest of KDE, and agreed with Chris that he'd > take Qt (Martin L ended up doing so), and KDE3. I worked on KDE2, got > that all set, and then burnt out *severely* working on KDE3. Doesn't > help when you've spent 15 or so hours in the day directly working on > KDE, and then you have a whole community flaming the crap out of you for > it not being ready. > > So, I burnt out and left. People come, take it, burn out, leave. Seems > to be rather cylical, and I certainly think group maintainership is an > excellent idea, but it's all about finding the people to do it. And people having the knowledge, even if they are DD it doesn't necessarily mean they know all and everything even for their own package. I don't want to flame anyone but it took me full 4 weeks to deal with Madkiss to prepare the Qt packaging in a state where it actually only needs minor maintenance. With QSA and Qt 3.2 ahead, that work will pop up again for a short time but I'm glad we did manage that out so far. > > That's my point about having a dedicated website, forum, wiki and > > whatever together with a _team_ of people (as suggested by the > > start of this thread or thereabouts) where the whole experience > > of managing a large project doesn't die when an individual finds > > it all too much, for whatever reason, and gives up. > > Well, there's not so much concrete advice one can offer, as just being > there to help you out of a hole. I can't give you a list of steps to > follow - just go in and have a bash, and email when you get stuck. Start the website debian.kde.org and we'll take care for the domain on the KDE side. That's what I can offer, as I already did in the past but until we have something set up it's just not going further there. > > Both Knoppix and Agnula need KDE debs, did you have any interaction > > with them to investigate an ongoing effort ? > > Er no, not yet. creadiv.de have certainly done very good things in the > past by sponsoring Ralf N for his KDE 3.1 and XFree86 4.3 woody > backports (a lot of his work also impacted on sid), and hopefully they > have an ongoing contribution. If they don't, that's also fine - they've > already done enough. We're continuing to do so, I may also note that I'm doing this in my spare time and partly this is taken over into my work time because we need things going. That's the reason why I spend so much time on it, one or the other way. And we need things to go into unstable because we're not following the path of other debian-based distros who think that if they diverge just good enough to lock customers into their solution they could bind customers. In the end those will just run away to a commercial distro from RH or SuSE. I sometimes really don't know if that is the real intention of those distros to just to make a product which locks customers or if it's just stupidity of the developers who think they can diverge no matter what the effects are in the long term if they don't deliver their stuff back into unstable :-) > > > As someone who has been there and done it, have you any advice for > > putting together a sustainable system that could survive in the > > longer term ? Your insight would be very helpful. > > Well, it needs to be a reasonably close-knit team: if you have a "team" > of four people all pulling in opposite directions, then you're never > going to get anywhere. Using the debian/ dirs in CVS as co-ordination, > with meta-information files, tags and branches, can't be at all bad - > it's currently working for myself and Branden with XFree86. > > Not much I can offer apart from that, apart from find good people, > please. - -- We're not a company, we just produce better code at less costs. - -------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralf Nolden [EMAIL PROTECTED] The K Desktop Environment The KDevelop Project http://www.kde.org http://www.kdevelop.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+q44vu0nKi+w1Ky8RApSVAJ49DMqMK5GPyNNeTDFJM6X135jIawCfQvih 651fvHJXydp3EF9UXWYmnFc= =Y6aS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
