Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Jan 14, David Brown [dmlb2000 AT gmail.com] wrote:
> > - I don't intend to spend a lot of time on a 1.0 release roadmap.  I
> >   frankly think it's wasted energy and not something we're ready for as
> >   things stand right now.  We need to solve a lot more basic problems
> >   before we're ready to even decide what "1.0" means.  Things like how to
> >   reliably do stable releases, how to have decent documentation, etc.  If
> >   the distro solves those things and is ready to figure out what "1.0"
> >   means for us then I'd look at that again, but for now I think it
> >   distracts and confuses us more than anything.  It just doesn't fit the
> >   model of who we are.  That's my opinion, anyway; if you disagree, I'm
> >   probably not who you want.
> 
> So does this mean you are for throwing out the 1.0 roadmap? I'd really
> like to have a good discussion about the release cycle and why we even
> have the idea of "1.0" still around. I'm not for having a 1.0 goal.
> I'd much rather see us develop a cycle of releasing iso's and
> grimoires (sorcery already has a good process and is sticking to it)
> then developing some sort of version on top to keep things,
> incremental to help distinguish between releases, but I don't think we
> need to enhance or build up the meaning of one particular version
> number. This would be something similar to udev's style of releases,
> version 100 of udev didn't have any more or less importance than 101
> or 99. So what I guess I'm asking is what do you see for the future of
> Source Mage? are you going to continue the idea of "working toward a
> 1.0," or are you in favor of throwing that out?

My own philosophy of things and the way I'd vote is like yours.  We need
goals so we know what we're working toward but I don't think a global
project "1.0" makes a lot of sense in the context of this distro and I
don't think working toward one has done us any favors.  So unless someone
convinces me otherwise, I'm generally not interested in that kind of thing,
even for the long term.  That doesn't mean that if the project as a whole
decides it wants to continue to work toward a 1.0 in the long term I
wouldn't go along with it, because it's not all up to me, PL or not.

But in the time I've been with this project I've only ever really seen the
1.0 roadmap get discussed in the few meetings we've had and periodic status
reports.  Meanwhile there's another set of issues that keep coming up that
we aren't getting progress on.  In the other mail I was saying that
especially in the short term I'd focus on those "real" issues and forget
entirely about talking about the 1.0 roadmap since I think right now it's
at most a distraction; we talk about stalled progress and someone brings up
the roadmap as what progress is supposed to be and I just don't think
that's where we are.  Right now we need docs and a repeatable process for
getting timely spell updates out to users and a few other things much more
than we need "the 1.0 release".

> What sort of release/process oriented aspects would you like changed or
> "refactored"?

We need a stable release process that is repeatable and doesn't depend on a
specific person or two being around.  I'm interested in seeing how Andrew's
current attempts toward the next stable grimoire release pan out.  If they
work out for us I'm fine doing it that way; if not we'll need to look at it
again and try to figure out what does work.  We also need to find a process
for getting docs that works, something more than people saying they'll work
on it if they get a chance.

I wish I could say I had a list of things to try, but I don't necessarily.
What I do want to do is put more focus on a smaller set of projects and
try to get us organized to work on those problems until we solve them vs.
having a large set of projects out there that people only work on here and
there.  We need to continue to let people work on what they want but I
think it's been demonstrated that we do better with people setting a
direction and not dividing our attention all over the place.  There are
some things we say we want that we aren't doing and can just put away for
now to focus on other things.

For docs, for example -- I'd say it's safe to say by now that the drupal
experiment just isn't getting it done for us.  In the absence of a Tome
lead who is actively producing docs on the wiki and getting them polished
and onto the drupal site I think we need (for now) to just go back a wiki
so we have one place to focus effort and hopefully get people more
motivated.  Even if we can't get docs that way we may as well just have one
site with poor documentation vs. two sites with poor documentation.  For
the forums and such we can probably find a quick way to get integration
with the ML in place so that we can cover that aspect and also don't have
to divide our limited resources artificially.

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