Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

sm-discuss - Re: [SM-Discuss] Grimoire Team Lead vote

sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Public SourceMage Discussion List

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>
  • To: SM Discuss <sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Grimoire Team Lead vote
  • Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:24:33 +0100

On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 08:03:17PM +0100, Arwed von Merkatz wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 09:42:16AM -0800, Andrew wrote:
> > I have a question for both candidates.
> >
> > What, if anything, are you going to do about getting additional grimoire
> > gurus? Is this a priority, and if so, where does it rank in comparison to
> > other goals?
>
> It is a priority, as we definitely don't have enough developers to
> maintain 4000+ spells in detail. The result of this is that what gets
> maintained is a) the popular stuff and b) the niche stuff that one of
> our developers uses. Overall spell quality has improved a lot over the
> last two years, but there's obviously still a long way to go.
> One of the main reasons (besides apparently perforce) that drives off
> potential developers is that the grimoire is big, and the sections are
> big. We need to advertise that becoming the maintainer of one spell - or
> a couple of spells - is a perfectly valid and welcome option for new
> contributors.
> What's most important to get new developers is of course getting new
> users. For that we need to continue improving the quality of the
> grimoires so that new users don't get put off because their favorite
> software fails to cast. Thus, improving the quality with the developer
> manpower we have now has higher priority than looking for new developers
> for me, except for the above suggestion.

Replying to myself here, although it's bad style ;)

While much of the current discussion seems to center around quality
currently, the features shouldn't be forgotten.
What does actually attract new users to a distro? Quality is certainly
one aspect, though that's something you can't really see from the outside,
unless the distribution has already earned a reputation for particularly
good or bad quality. One of the things many users look at is options and
versions. A distribution offering the current gnome2 release shortly
after the release has more potential to attract new users than one that
offers a two release cycle old version of gnome2.
So quality is a worthwhile goal, and we should strive for it. But that
doesn't mean that driving the development of the grimoires forward
should be taken lightly. The best quality won't give you new users if
you have a reputation for 'stale' stable releases (compare with the last
debian stable release cycle that took years).
To achieve a good middle ground between quality and pushing new
features, we need more automated testing of updates and features.
This is probably a good area for prometheus, though it needs to be more
controlled than what prometheus did in the past. I'm thinking of options
like 'cast every spell depending on X, then update X, see what breaks,
recast everything depending on X, see what breaks', ran automatically on
commit of the update to X. This could include pulling the update
automatically into test if there are no issues found.

--
Arwed v. Merkatz Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
http://www.sourcemage.org




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page