Re: [Opensync-devel] Getting things back on track

[Daniel G. <go...@b1...>]

On Monday 19 October 2009 12:53:13 am Paul Eggleton wrote:
[...]
> I think it's plain to everyone that as a project we have a serious problem.
> Things are not moving forward at the pace that we really need them to and
>  have not been for quite some time, and this fact has not gone unnoticed by
>  the wider community. Every day people complain about the lack of decent
>  synchronisation support in open source products, so there is definitely
>  great demand - and yet OpenSync is still not ready to solve the problem.

Ack.

> 
> I just read a blog posting [1] by one of the Akonadi developers about some
> discussions that have gone on at their recent meeting. It seems for now
>  they have given up waiting for OpenSync and are looking at alternatives.
>  This is extremely unfortunate - historically I would have considered the
>  Akonadi project to be one of OpenSync's strongest allies.

Thats not new to me ... the kde-pim and akonadi developers stated this several 
times the last weeks/months. Not quite sure how many of them really checked if 
this true or not ...

But what they're doing is "just" moving KitchenSync and libqopensync to 
playground, which is a development branch AFAIK. Which sounds reasonable to me 
... so no reason to get panic.

But it's funny to see that Sascha Peilicke is commenting here ... you might 
remember him from the past when he complained about the glibc dependency of 
libsyncml ... (i still hope he mixed that up with glib ;))


> 
> Now, I recognise that many of us (especially me) have not contributed much
>  to the core of OpenSync. The problem there at least from my perspective is
>  that few of us have enough information about the vision behind the
>  OpenSync core or its internals in order to contribute effectively to it -
>  most of the responsibility these days falls on Daniel to answer any
>  questions or to make decisions.

Right.

>  Daniel, I do recognise that you don't have
>  as much time to work on OpenSync as you used to, and nobody would blame
>  you for that; however if the project is to go forward then something has
>  to change.

In fact things changed for me in mid September and last weeks very 
dramatically, in terms of spare time. But i still try to stick with the 
project and invest much as time as possible an reasonable. But private things 
come first ... i hope you understand that.

So you're completely right - and I also have concerns about the very low BUS-
factor [1] we have for OpenSync core development. If I disappear for a while 
OpenSync development trunk sometimes freezes. Maybe instead of concentrating 
on getting 0.40 out ASAP, i should try to get rid of this low BUS factor ... 
and concentrate on helping developers to start with core development 
primarily. I tried this now and then .. and succeed in some cases - e.g. 
Björn. But he has also limited spare time, like all of us. So we need more 
core developers to solve this problem. To bring this BUS factor high enough to 
speed up the trunk development in OpenSync core ...

Since i had the entire day to think about an solution, I'll come up with a new 
plan to address this BUS factor problem - in a separated mail.

[...]

> I myself stand fully ready to get involved more closely, but I need
>  guidance - documentation that covers the design foremost. In a number of
>  areas I would just need a few pointers on where to look, some commentary
>  on how things are supposed to work etc. and then I can fill in the blanks
>  and write full documentation. Armed with more information about OpenSync's
>  inner workings, perhaps more people can help solve the remaining issues
>  and finally get a stable release out there.

Thanks for your contribution and volunteering for core development ...

> 
> Let's get back on track!

Right, let's start ...


[...]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Best Regards,
Daniel

-- 
Daniel Gollub                        Geschaeftsfuehrer: Ralph Dehner
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