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  • From: Ladislav Hagara <ladislav.hagara AT unob.cz>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Grimoire Lead vote for 2010
  • Date: Thu, 08 Apr 2010 02:41:15 +0200

Sorry, no time for prepared speech. Moreover I don't like long speeches I always prefer to make some work for Source Mage.

I am proud of Source Mage. It is a great distro. Thanks all who help us to make it as great as it is now. Of course there are areas we can improve it.

How to improve quality assurance/control? We need more developers and more users who really use Source Mage. I personally invited several users used our bugzilla and some of them really become developers.

Some automation is possible, we can easily generate thousands of new bug reports. But who will fix them? Not so much developers as we needed for this. Not so much time. Developers prefer to fix bugs related to their own boxes. They have to fix them if they want to surf the net, if they want to see movie or listen to music, if they run their servers for some business. More developers and users is equal to better quality.

How to reduce the number of bug reports in our bugzilla? I would more publish some stats. Some montly reviews, the counts of new bug reports, fixed bug reports. We could organize bug huntings, announce the best hunters. Czech beer for the best ones. ;-)

We really need to organize next meetings. In the first, and at the same time last one, European meetings, lots of bugs were fixed.

We need to know who exactly really use test, stable-rc and stable grimoire. I would make stable-rc grimoire standard one again. Users could scribe it and we support it all time. Updates went into stable through stable-rc. Todays stable-rc creation is great but after stable release we abandon it. Users have to scribe from stable-rc to stable and vice versa. We need to know that stable-rc was really tested, who test it now? Usually one or two developers.

You know my option about git branches. I remember I said "do you want to burn some spells, create a new git branch and push them there". Nothing changed. Theoretical the git branches are great, but not for us until we don't provide some kiss tools for users to try that branches. It isn't normal that we as a source based distro have in test grimoire only gcc 4.3.3. We should provide some small devel grimoires (devel-grimoire-gcc, devel-grimoire-xorg, ...) users can scribe add and use it. On the other side I have no problem with several versions of program in one spell. For example openssl. In git branch it could be abandoned. Now user cast openssl and answer if he/she wants 0.9 (by default) or 1.0. Developers cast 1.0 and fixes problems.

One thing I would improve is our source tarballs verifying. For source tarballs signed by vendors keys I would add second level of veryfying, our own signature or hash or push wendors sign files into grimoire. We have sources signed by people we really don't know, we don't how their protect their private key. If some bad guy gains control over vendor www of ftp server and publishes sources with "rm -rf /*" for example in configure and signed it with stolen vendor key, we have no chance to catch it, really no fun on production servers.

We have to improve our sm-commits emails or git pushes reviews. Change sm-commits to one email for spell not for git push. Not possible to review 1 MB emails. We should have some rules to review all git pushes. Some working shifts to really check and guarantee all pushes for example for 6 hours.

I plan to rework http://ledger.sourcemage.org/ to gain more statistics.

I would continue with our support for z-rejected grimoire.

But what can I do as a grimmoire lead? All is about spontaneity, I can't manage other developers, I can't rule them. Strict rules scare them away. What to do? Be a good example.

PS:
Next two days I will be without emails. Business trip to Prague.
To sign some deal. :-)

--
Ladislav 'lace' Hagara







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