Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/10/01/20:41:42
> As far as I can see it's their only Launchpad team, there is no "KiCAD
> Administrators".
Ok, so they have a different organization than we do. They also have
only one software package - kicad itself. gEDA isn't itself a
software package, it's an idea. It contains multiple software
packages, such as gaf, pcb, icarus, and gnucap.
> As you ask me: gEDA needs fewer groups. Especially this
> "Administrators" group is pointless. Ideally there'd be one group
> for all parts of gEDA.
The only purpose of the admins group is to own the other groups. We
don't use it for anything else other than to have a bus number greater
than one when it comes to doing launchpad-maintainer things. So, for
the purposes of this argument, the geda administrators group is
irrelevent.
What is relevent? We have a pcb group and a geda-gaf group. They
supply bug trackers for pcb and geda-gaf. We don't use them for
anything else. Do we need more bug trackers? If it weren't for the
bug trackers, we wouldn't use launchpad at all - we switched only
because the bug trackers on sourceforge were worse. Everything else
is done on gedaproject.
> I'm aware you likely disagree with me on this one, but for me there is
> no such thing like "ownership" in an open source collaborative project.
Perhaps, but there are owners of things like copyrights, machines,
domain names, launchpad accounts, etc. There are people who are
authorized to make official releases and who have the respect required
to speak for the project. There are people who drive the direction of
development. These three categories are not the same! Development
can be driven by anyone with a compelling vision, but we can't give
the keys to the machines to anyone who asks. It just doesn't work.
Even GCC is set up like this. The FSF is the "owner". The steering
committee oversees the operation of the project (by assigning
maintainers and deciding policy). The maintainers drive development
among all developers.
If we opened up the git repo to everyone, and some script kiddies came
in and replaced all our code with obscenities, would you consider them
to be the new "owners"?
> For other list readers and regarding Launchpad teams in general: being
> an owner of such a team brings almost no more privileges than a single
> user account:
And yet a great deal of grief has been caused by the "closed" nature
of a group that exists only to maintain those owners.
> The only exception is the obvious thing needed for a team: one can
> accept members.
The only reason to accept members to the admin team is if we want more
people who can assign others to accept members in the sub-projects,
then?
> There's no connection to the Git repository, so no risk there. One
> also can't prohibit people from filing bugs or commenting on
> existing bugs. Needless to say, such kind of controls were
> pointless anyways. To sum up, such an "admin" team is almost a hoax.
As I've said, the only reason we have an admin team is to own the
sub-teams. We don't use it for anything else.
> Founding gEDAhead had only three reasons: to allow a team-owned PPA, to
> make very clear that contributors are welcome and to allow people
> contributing. In this regard I consider it to be successful.
In what way do the existing pcb and geda-gaf groups discourage
contributors or deny contributions? How are they deficient, in that
you need to replicate their purpose (bug tracking) elsewhere?
And if they *are* deficient, why aren't you proposing instead to fix
them?
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