Re: CVS policy

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, Daniel Veillard wrote:

>   In this specific case I think getting Galeon into Gnome CVS makes
> perfect sense. It's a very promising Gnome application and from my
> small experience with both Galeon and Nautilus they both shared the
> same kind of problems related to the interface with Mozilla component,
> getting both develoopers community closer sounds a good thing, sharing
> the same CVS is one step forward IMHO.

There are plenty of "promising Gnome applications" out there, and
personally Galeon isn't high on my list...

> > There's two major schools of thought on this.
> > 
> > One is best represented by Elliot. He thinks we should keep tight
> > reins over adding new projects and new people, because if we draw the
> > line wider than the core components of Gnome, we may end up not being
> > able to say no to anyone. And endless growth is not a good option,
> > because we don't have per-module ACLs or any of the other things
> > needed to provide a good, complete hosting service.
> 
>   I wonder how many people are in need of ACL or ACL like mechanism
> for large CVS base. As W3C CVS base maintainer this is one of my major
> issues with CVS right now. Pointers on existing solutions would be
> appreciated. But ACL are not users friendly, I far prefer having
> the commit policy written in the HACKING file of a project than relying
> on obstrusive system enforcement (unless very cleanly integrated).

Well, you are making this statement assuming that ACLs cannot be
implemented nicely. I contend that they can be, but of course am unable to
provide such an implementation at the moment :)

> > If ACLs are
> > a serious concern, that is something we should come up with a solution
> > for. But the benefits of having major gnome projects all on one cvs
> > server are fairly significant; it makes things a lot easier for people
> > like me who build stuff from source all the time.
> 
>   there are other technical issues:
>     - resource usages:
>       + bandwidth for gnome CVS server is good, thanks to RedHat connectivity
>         we should make sure that there is room for groth before importing
> 	popular and large projects
>       + disk space
>       + will anonymous server mirrors be able to keep up ?
>     - maintenance:
>       + there is currently nearly 400 top level directories in that CVS
>         base, do we clean up at some point, how ?
>       + who manages admin requests: creating logins, importing stuff ...
>       + the larger the CVS base the harder to keep the bonzai and other
>         indexing tools scaling properly.

Issues like these are why I don't want to turn GNOME CVS etc. from hosting
for core GNOME stuff into another sourceforge-like place for GNOME apps.
There may be a lot of junk currently in GNOME CVS that IMHO shouldn't be,
but that doesn't justify adding more junk. :) My guess is that we can't do
better than sourceforge on the scale necessary.

We can't do a good enough job of hosting the stuff we have, and definitely
don't have the infrastructure needed to do serious hosting for people. If
I had infinite time, I would rewrite the user database to add ACLs and
allow for permissioned maintainance by a lot more people (e.g. maintainer
of a module can add users who are allowed to access only that module).

It appears that there are two separate decisions to be made:
	. Whether we want to do hosting of non-core modules
	. If not, what exactly the core modules are.

My answers are "no" and "whatever it takes to get a basic GNOME desktop
running - libraries & dependencies, gnome-core, control-center, and
nautilus".

-- Elliot
"The Pythagorean Theorem employed 24 words, the Lord's Prayer has 66 words,
Archimedes Principle has 67 words, the 10 Commandments have 179 words, the
Gettysburg Address had 286 words, the Declaration of Independence, 1,300 words and
finally the European Commission's regulation on the sale of cabbage: 26,911 words."