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  • From: Seth Woolley <swoolley AT panasas.com>
  • To: SM Discuss <sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] Grimoire Team Lead vote response consolidation of SCM/Guru recruiting/fundraising
  • Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 10:36:32 -0800

SCM WARS:

It looks like svn/svk/bzr are the main runners in the scm wars.

It also looks like people want:

cherry-picking
intelligent, repeatable merges
decentralization
free software
stable
uptime

(in no particular order right now)

Without picking one, it looks like we can make some progress on this issue. That's good. That's a lot of "looking". A real "decision" on this would be premature right now for this election, but I would support moving off of perforce before we hit 1.0 if we have enough steam behind it, and I think we do.

GURU RECRUITING/NON-PROFIT/FUNDRAISING:

Our number one priority to recruit gurus is to get a 1.0 stable release out the door. It has to be what it advertizes though. When we're almost ready for this, I intend to help stabilize the install process -- and by that I mean the GRIMOIRE. The ISO may be good, but we need to make sure people can cast a program and expect good things to come of it regardless of their dependencies. To fix this issue (the major issue I've found in the grimoire), I intend to write scripts to help find these problems. We can use autotools info, for example, to derive what's needed for spells and I can flag missing dependencies (I think Paul might have even written some scripts that help do this), but that would have to be scripted. We need more lint controls on submits to the grimoire. This dovetails into prometheus. I have a lot of ideas for good ol' prommie like this. I already have a symbol lint checker that can spot more issues that won't happen until execution, but will cause an ok compile. I expect some of prommie's features will be too late for 1.0, but I want to get it ready to go asap (as soon as my hardware catches up with me in a couple weeks, this will be a main priority).

When we're ready, we have to blitz. The 15 seconds of fame lasts about two weeks long, but we could extend it out to maybe a month. We need to schedule lug meetings with people representing us (myself included) to go around right after announcement on /./dw/etc. We need to have a non-profit filed by then to take future deductible donations, and if possible we can use the initial donations to help pay for the filing fees for 501(c)3 status in the US (which can be retroactive). The rest can help our server instructure, and if there's any available after that -- good, we might be able to open bug bounties or something. We also might consider getting or hiring an accountant/treasurer. They always pay for themselves.

I have experience being the (elected) fundraising/financing manager for multiple-employee, office-leasing non-profit organizations with budgets in the tens of thousands of dollars a year and hundreds if not thousands of individual small donors (even monthly sustainers). It's amazing what you can do when you can pay for people's hardware to do testing/developing on. Also as a non-profit you're more likely to get hardware donations from big corps who want to make sure they are supporting everything. Plus, I think with some fine-tuning, people will be ready for us. The key will be to differentiate with Gentoo. We aren't the same, and we know that, but we have to explain why we are different, feature and philosophy-wise. Pamphlets are good to take to lug meetings. Making copies of something that they can take home with them to remind them of us is almost as good as an actual CD, and people are more likely to take the paper than a CD if they are undecided on trying it.

--
Seth Alan Woolley
Software Engineer
Accelerating Time to Results(TM) with Clustered Storage

www.panasas.com
swoolley AT panasas.com
510-608-4382



  • [SM-Discuss] Grimoire Team Lead vote response consolidation of SCM/Guru recruiting/fundraising, Seth Woolley, 03/15/2006

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