Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>]

On Sunday 04 March 2007 11:29:55 Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik wrote:
> My few questions for the grimoire nominees.
>
> a) New grimoire features like keywords and other sich things.
>    What do you plan on doing about them and any other new
>    features?

First business for this is to write an accepted KEYWORDS page, much like our 
current accepted LICENSE page[0].

> b) Try to unify as many BUILD/INSTALL files and systems into
>    a single default_build(something that the gnustep sections do)
>    or the new spell file inheritance scheme.
>    Your opinion on this?

Easily accomplished with a section FUNCTIONS file that overrides 
default_build. GNUstep, perl-cpan, and kde4 use this, I believe, and others 
are definately welcome, and encouraged, to it if they need. GNOME also uses 
this to redefine default_pre_remove for that silly gconf.

> c) Maintaining of critical spells like glibc, gcc.
>    How would new versions be handled? Will you do the version bump?
>    Delegate it to someone else?

I would like to see more people apply for section maintainership and have 
them 
delegate or maintain those spells. We have a test grimoire for a reason, 
along with peer review, so any bugs/mixups in spells should be caught before 
making it to stable.

> d) What's te ammount of time you could give to supporting gurus
>    with issues, questions, etc? Availability for gurus?

In short, not as much as I'd like, but I will be available in some form (IRC, 
IM, e-mail) for those with questions at least a few hours out of every day.

I am currently working full-time, but have a little time at both jobs to talk 
in IRC, read mailing lists, and fiddle. I am also getting married in 
September (to SweetPotato ;)), so will be *very* busy around that time. Other 
than that, I have a potential contract job that would have me traveling every 
other week or so, and I may or may not have Internet access on some of those 
trips.

> e) Long overdue project on the wiki:
>    http://wiki.sourcemage.org/LicenseInventory
>    Would be nice to acctually start enforcing this more and
>    try to cleanup everything.
>    Also an that same note: spellifing licenses(already have a
>    base for this).
>    Your opinion on this? Sholud we try to clean out badly licensed
>    spells as a project or leave it in a fix it as you find it state?

Perhaps after we have our stable release process going smoothly for a few 
months and we cut down on the number of bugs in the grimoire, we can look at 
the license list, but I see this as a fairly low priority item. Fixing these 
as you find them will be encouraged, but no official audit would be in the 
works until higher priority items are taken care of.

> f) Opinion on supporting z-rejected as a developer grimoire(getting
>    that Free mark from FSF/GNU is acctually starting to count for a
>    lot of people I talked with online when I recommended them source
>    mage. Many didn't want to use it because of that.)?

I'm not sure how z-rejected is denying us the "Free" mark. All software we 
write is GPL'd, our ISO only comes with Open Source software as far as we 
know, we have a Social Contract[1] that ensures our Freeness, and we don't 
require anyone to use packages in z-rejected. Perhaps a list of what we are 
missing would help.

> Well that's all. Have fun answering. On a side note I don't think anyone
> yet accepted their nomination.

I'll try and send an actual speech to the ML soon.

-sandalle

[0] http://wiki.sourcemage.org/LicenseList
[1] http://www.sourcemage.org/SocialContract

-- 
Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us PGP: 0xA8EFDD61  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  http://counter.li.org/  #196285

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