Public SourceMage Discussion List

[David Kowis <dkowis AT shlrm.org>]

Alexander Tsamutali wrote:
> 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
> 

I've been out of town and in a wreck, so I'm replying rather late.

Quit blabbing about what we need done, and volunteer your time to do it.

Website is open, make content.

There's craploads of bugs in bugzilla, make patches.

Not sure about the complexity one, could probably be solved by writing
documentation.

This has happened before, we try to find the one "perfect solution."
There is none. Just work on the things you want to get fixed, get people
to help you.

I'd like to have a freeze on the grimoire when we come up to release
time. No commits to test until we've finished fixing the bugs that have
to be fixed. That's it. No exceptions. "Real" software processes work
this way. You've a feature freeze and then you work on the release.
Anything spiffy or unneccesary is omitted, or put off until later. We
don't do that. We're pretty lax.

On the other end of the spectrum, we could simply drop stable-rc and
stable, since no one works on them anyway. I don't like this idea, but
it would be the opposite of what I described in the previous paragraph.

Just my thoughts on this matter/


-- 
David Kowis

ISO Team Lead - www.sourcemage.org
SourceMage GNU/Linux

Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to
find easier ways to do something.
  - Robert Heinlein

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