Public SourceMage Discussion List

[George Sherwood <pilot AT beernabeer.com>]

On Sat, 03 Apr 2010 09:27:30 -0500
David Kowis <dkowis AT shlrm.org> wrote:
> I have a couple open questions, anyone can answer, but I'm most
> interested in what the candidates would say.
> 
> What do you think needs the most improvement in SMGL, and why?
> 
> What specifically in the grimoire needs the most improvement, and why?
> 
> What needs to change to get more users, or do we need to get more
> users?
> 
> What needs to change to get more developers, or do we need to get more
> developers?
> 
> Have fun :)
> 
> David
> 

Here is some of my repeat of speech from 2007 and some answer to the
posted questions.

General:

I have been working as grimoire developer for a long time and while
that fact alone shouldn't make me deserve your vote, what I believe
should is that for many years I have maintained one of the highest
commit levels of any of the developers.  I definitely think that the
grimoire lead should be deeply involved with actual development of
the grimoire from updating common spells to working with more difficult
spells such as Mozilla products and fixing bugs.  This would bring me
to the first question.

> What specifically in the grimoire needs the most improvement, and why?

A dedicated effort at writing up bugs and fixing bugs. I think there
are many things that work, but aren't quite right, but we tend to live
with it until it is totally broken.  Many spells have outdated configure
options, but they continue to work and very few take the time to write
up the bugs or fix them.  More than anything the grimoire needs a lead
who is consistently involved in working with all aspects of the
grimoire. The holy grail for this seems to be some form of automated
testing which I would like to see implemented, but there are many
things we can do short of that to get the grimoire working better.

> What do you think needs the most improvement in SMGL, and why?

I think this is a better question for the PL and his vision is what
will lead to solid improvements in the distro.  I believe strongly that
Eric is on the correct track now with attention being paid to enforcing
policies and working to change those that need that also.  To improve
the distro developers must look beyond their own installation and
getting that working correctly and work to making the entire distro
working.  The install has come miles, but seems to have stalled we need
to continue to improve this critical area.

> What needs to change to get more users, or do we need to get more
> users?

I think we need to ensure that a users first experience with the distro
from the install to the first rebuild goes as smoothly as possible.
Users that struggle to get a booting working system generally with X
and X applications will not stay around long.

> What needs to change to get more developers, or do we need to get more
> developers?

We need to get more users that see the greatness that is in Source Mage
and make the decision to stick around and improve the distro.

If there are any other specific questions, let me know.

George Sherwood
Lead Grimoire Developer
Source Mage GNU Linux

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