Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Alexander Tsamutali" <astsmtl AT gmail.com>]

Hi, as you probably understood, i am unsatisfied with the current
state of our project. Source Mage is quite unpopular, our user base is
too small and our products are buggy and inconsistent. Currently we
have ~5500 spells and only 48 developers listed on the website. Don't
get me wrong, i'm not associating popularity and quality [0]. But i
think everyone will agree that a big number of users and developers is
generally a Good Thing for software (especially _free_ software). We
need to do something. We need to analyze our problems, define some
solutions, goals and strive to be the best distribution.

Our main problems, IMHO:

* Pale web presence
* Buggy grimoire
* Inconsistency, sometimes unneeded complexity in development

Check out main pages of other linux distributions, for ex.:

http://www.lunar-linux.org
http://www.archlinux.org
http://www.zenwalk.org

...then compare it with our main page:

Changes to test between...
Changes to stable between...

...and nothing else. Meanwhile sorcery mages made a huge advance in
development of staging feature, and new stable-rc appeared. One of the
function of our website is to reflect the various activities via news.
Currently we have no news, for visitors it means we have no
development activities.

Currently we have ~1000 open grimoire bugs in bugzilla which is tooo
big for ~5500 spells. Almost every new user has some problems,
sometimes very serious problems. We need to release and maintain
really _stable_ grimoire, to improve user experience.

So what do you think about? How to improve our distro? I have some
proposals which i'll post later.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/iflisp.html

--
Alexander Tsamutali