Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Ladislav Hagara <ladislav.hagara AT unob.cz>]

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