What are some good practices for managing a successful project? “You need to keep an open mind while carefully listening to what others have to say,” advises Curtis Gedak. “Keeping your cool and remaining patient is also essential to understanding a perspective that might differ from your own. And remember to recognize the contributions of individuals, and to provide credit for accomplishments where credit is due.” Those words of wisdom – and some pretty useful software – have propelled the project Gedak manages, GParted, to a spot on the weekly Tops Downloads list on SourceForge.net. GParted’s latest release came out last week.
GParted is a disk device partition editor. A physical disk device can be subdivided into one or more partitions on which the operating system can read and write data. GParted enables you to change the partition organization on a disk device while preserving the contents of the partitions. It lets you create, delete, and move partitions, and move free space from one partition to another, among other tasks. GParted supports a broad range of disk devices, including memory cards, USB drives, hard disks, and RAID systems.
The application is developed on GNU/Linux, but it can be used on other operating systems, such as Windows and Mac OS X, by booting machines running those OSes from a GParted Live CD.
Bart Hakvoort, the original author of GParted, placed the GParted project on SourceForge.net in July 2004. Back then, before SourceForge offered integrated hosted applications, the project team decided to host the forum separately using PunBB software, and placed bug reporting and application source code on GNOME servers. The arrangement works well for the developers. “We have been pleased with the project services offered by SourceForge.net,” Gedak says. “The uptime reliability and the multiple download mirrors are a great asset. We do not foresee changing to a different provider.”
However, Gedak does foresee some enhancements to the project code, many of which have been suggested by users, including:
– Support for devices with sector sizes greater than 512 bytes
– Partition alignment rounding to nearest megabyte
– Support for Logical Volume Management (physical volumes initially)
– Improve progress indicators for long-running tasks
– Enable changing UUID identifiers (useful if copying partitions)
The project works toward making new, non-bugfix releases about every couple of months.
Gedak says the project is a big collaborative effort. “We are fortunate to have many volunteers who contribute their knowledge and time. Currently some of the most active people are:
– Steven Shiau, who maintains GParted Live media images
– Jan Claeys, who administers our forum and monitors our IRC channel
– Class413, who moderates our forum and responds to questions
– Cmdr, who shares his knowledge with our forum users
– Francois Dupoux, who provides feedback on development issues
– And myself, Curtis Gedak, who maintains the GParted application code
“We also benefit from several multilingual people on the GNOME Translation Teams who have translated GParted into other languages.”
Keeping all those individuals moving in the same direction is not as difficult a chore as you might think. “Fortunately for me these individuals are self-motivated,” Gedak says, “and they actively identify and tackle challenges on their own. Very little coordination is required; however, when the need arises, we use email as the primary communication tool.”
Gedak says more help on the project is always welcome. “We have some documentation on our web site that is out of date, and the perspective and efforts of another developer would certainly help to improve the application. The best way to get in touch with the project is via e-mail.”