Re: [E-devel] Eina

[Christopher M. <cpm...@co...>]

Nick Hughart wrote:
> Christopher Michael wrote:
>> Nick Hughart wrote:
>>> Hisham Mardam Bey wrote:
>>>> On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 1:46 PM, dan sinclair <dj...@wi...> 
>>>> wrote:
>>>>  
>>>>> On 3-Aug-08, at 1:27 PM, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri wrote:
>>>>>   
>>>>>> Hey, but that's ok for _YOU_, isn't it?! You already said it's fine
>>>>>> and that's exactly the purpose to use BSD over LGPL. We're just being
>>>>>> more friendly and instead of keeping it proprietary.
>>>>>>       
>>>>> People contributing to the community? Sure that's ok for me. That's ok
>>>>> for everyone I believe. I think that's kinda the point. People
>>>>> contributing to the community works perfectly well under BSD and has
>>>>> been working perfectly well.
>>>>>
>>>>>     
>>>> Dan, if you're referring to the EFL community, then I really think you
>>>> should look at just how many active contributors we have. The number
>>>> of people contributing to CVS is tiny, I wouldn't exactly use the word
>>>> "perfect" to describe this situation, unless of course you think that
>>>> 5 or less people contributing code and a couple hundred users that
>>>> like to experiment with "alternate desktop environments" constitute
>>>> what you'd call a "community working perfectly well". In 10 years
>>>> time, we've made almost no noticible progress when it comes to growing
>>>> the EFL developer or user base. We're still regarded as a niche and
>>>> elitist group both in developer and user land. I believe its time to
>>>> change the rules of the game and see what happens, specially given the
>>>> fact that developers backed by companies are showing interest in
>>>> contributing code under LGPL (and are starting to pave the future path
>>>> of the EFL by doing so).
>>>>   
>>>
>>> And we are to assume it was the license all along?  I can't say I 
>>> agree with that.  In fact I think it has nothing to do with the 
>>> license, but possibly with the people involved.  Raster is a 
>>> developer, not a marketing machine and as far as I've been part of 
>>> this community, I haven't seen anyone step forward to really act as 
>>> the lead of a marketing type department for E.  Also, has usage of 
>>> open source in the corporate world been the same over the last 10 
>>> years?  Did the introduction of the LGPL all the sudden accelerate 
>>> open source into corporate use?  I don't think it has as much to do 
>>> with the license as it does with the people who are in the 
>>> community.  If we've pushed away people who could help in this dept 
>>> then that was our fault.
>>>
>> Totally agree with Nick here. My thoughts exactly.
>>
>>> I think the biggest fear the community has is that letting in 
>>> excessive amounts of devs will hurt the high performance and 
>>> stability measures that we keep around here (I could be wrong, but it 
>>> feels this way).  This doesn't have to be the case and we could 
>>> definitely open ourselves up a bit more, but I think we have to be 
>>> careful how we do so and I think we have to refrain from jumping to 
>>> conclusions on how to fix it, i.e. licensing changes.
>> Agreed.
>>
>>> You said it yourself, we are considered niche and elitist and I can 
>>> certainly think of reasons why that is.  People find our use of CVS 
>>> out-dated.  They don't understand how CVS works because they've come 
>>> from projects that use Subversion or Git instead and are used to 
>>> those.  I don't think these days it's really a matter of CVS just 
>>> working, it may just be one of the blockers that many potential devs 
>>> don't feel like bothering with.  Another is just people in the 
>>> community in general, we may not have this elitist tag for nothing ;)
>>>
>> Well, as with the license issue, I cannot see our choice of SCMS being 
>> a real blocker. If someone is interesting in using/contributing to 
>> "E", then they will. SCMS doesn't really have anything todo with this 
>> IMO. I've heard you say it many times Nick...Subversion is just like 
>> CVS :) So if they can use Subversion, they can use CVS :P
>>
>> dh
> 
> Yes, you're right, I have said that and I still think it's quite true.  
> I was more thinking from a pure psychological point a view though, they 
> just don't like using CVS because to them it's old and outdated, they 
> want to use the new stuff with all it's fancy technology.  Git is quite 
> a bit different and I've never had the opportunity to play with it 
> enough to make a firm judgment, so I won't say much about it's usability.

Kind of how I hate to use Subversion ?? ;) Still tho, I don't see any 
particular SCMS being an issue really. If someone believes enough in the 
project, they will take the time to learn. Switching to a new SCMS, IMO, 
is not going to magically attract tons more developers/contributors. 
Same for switching licenses IMO.

>>
>>> I think the true failure we generally have is we will wait a long 
>>> time until raster has the opportunity to speak up about an issue.  
>>> Can we not put together a "board" of people to help make these type 
>>> of decisions?  Have a loose vote for implementing something and go on 
>>> our merry way.  I know we've talked about having meetings before and 
>>> that's never really happened, just too many people getting busy.  
>>> Would be nice to have some people with a clear vision for where we 
>>> want this project to go and then we aren't relying on a single 
>>> person, who happens to end up busy quite often, to make the final 
>>> call.  In general, is it not best to just get code done and if it 
>>> fails to perform to our standards, it gets 
>>> replaced/removed/modified?  At least something got done and if at 
>>> least 50% of this code is useful are we not ahead of where we would 
>>> have been had no one taken the initiative?  Now this could go south 
>>> and we could get a bunch of crappy code, but I don't think that will 
>>> happen with the community we have.  If we instill the vision on every 
>>> developer who comes along instead of dumping their ideas in the trash 
>>> we may just build a bigger community that can help us achieve what 
>>> we've longed to achieve.
>>>
>>> I'm still new around here compared to other devs, but I think I'm 
>>> somewhere between the old and the new group which gives me an 
>>> interesting perspective :)  Putting on my flame suit now, do your worst.
> 
>