[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Bugs against the Essen branch
From:       Marijn Kruisselbrink <m.kruisselbrink () student ! tue ! nl>
Date:       2010-09-23 17:02:21
Message-ID: 201009231902.24868.m.kruisselbrink () student ! tue ! nl
[Download RAW message or body]

On Thursday 23 September 2010 18:39:10 Pierre Stirnweiss wrote:
> - our release schedule does not fit with Nokia's, let's create a branch so
> they can continue to develop features. Yes it's open source and nobody can
> force anybody to work on something he is not interrested in. But then, why
> do we bother with a release schedule and freeze periods,.... In my mind,
> those things are there because it is good practice in the community to try
> to concentrate your time and effort during these periods at solving
> problems. Nobody forces you to, but then again, nobody forces you to leave
> your seat in the bus to the old person, it is just something you do.
Yes, it is not an ideal situation, but as you could have noticed, the vast 
majority of Nokia sponsored commits have still been bugfixed that have been 
comitted to trunk. So it is not like Nokia is not trying to help with 
stabilizing koffice trunk. Yes, sometimes people make mistakes and commit 
bugfixed to the branch instead of trunk, but those are just that, mistakes.

> - our API does not fit a yet unreleased project of Nokia, let's pay some of
> the contributors to just change the API the way we want without having to
> clarify in detail the use case. Yes, it was discussed during a sprint where
> everybody of the community was invited. However, not everybody could attend
> and the resulting design was not presented to the community at large with
> the grounds for changing the API. The changes were (if I understood
> properly, so correct me if I am wrong here) done, discussed and approved
> under the sponsorship of Nokia. Given the people involved, I have no doubt
> that the design is sound and will improve KOffice. However, the process
> seems to me like first class citizens doing stuff among themselves, which
> the second class citizens just have to accept as good face value.
The 4 days between these patches being posted to koffice-devel and them being 
cmomitted might indeed have been a bit short. But it was posted for review, 
including a description of the design, and what it accomplished. And I think 
it even got reviewed by people that were (at the time) in no way involved 
with Nokia or any of its subcontractors (although unfortunately those reviews 
didn't happen on the mailing list).

> - the bug reporting workflow does not fit our workflow of development in a
> separate branch during freeze, let's accomodate the bug reporting workflow.
The way I see it, Nokia is now trying to come up with a workflow that works 
for both Nokia and the community, not trying to force their workflow onto the 
community. And I think it is already a big improvement over the old 
situation, where Nokia would just use their own bugreporting infratructure 
instead of trying to integrate into the community.

> Even if individually they all seem pretty harmless with quite a minimal
> impact on the community, the overall behaviour seems to imply that there
> are two types of citizens now: the ones who adhere to the community's rules
> and the ones who can bend the rules when it suits them. I am not very easy
> with this. It gives me more and more the feeling that KOffice is moving
> from "a community project with welcomed commercial interest contributions"
> to "a commercial interest project with welcomed community contribution".
Yes, it is hard to find the right balance here. And it is also rather hard to 
make a big company understand that just because they pay people to develop 
code, does not mean that that code will end up in an opensource project. So 
this is definitely something that needs work.
And yes, I agree that the way commercial developers interact/integrate in the 
community is far from perfect every now and then, but it is a very difficult 
situation when commercial interests and community interests don't fully 
align.

Marijn
_______________________________________________
koffice-devel mailing list
koffice-devel@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice-devel
[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]