[Mailman-Developers] Should we move to Bazaar?

[Barry Warsaw]

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Thanks for all the excellent feedback folks!

On May 2, 2007, at 6:25 PM, Fil wrote:

> when I tried to do some work on Mailman, a while ago (a few years, in
> fact), I was not put off by the (then) CVS system used, but more by
> the fact that it seemed very difficult to get write priviledges (I
> didn't insist enough either, though I got the GNU assignment papers);
> and by the fact that the GNU requirements are quite strict, which lead
> me to wonder what was really "mine" in the patch I would have liked to
> offer (as it was inspired in part by someone else's patch).

I read a blog entry by Ian Bicking about this subject, which I think  
he wrote back in 2005.  He also pointed out that write privileges are  
a big sticking point for community participation in code development,  
to which I agree.  However, he also concluded that dvcs's are /bad/  
for open source because they encourage private branches, and  
everything should be done in the open.

I agree that we should strive for maximal openness, but I don't agree  
that dvcs's necessarily make things less open.  I think it's entirely  
possible they make things /more/ open.  There's certainly nothing  
preventing anyone from publishing their own dvcs branches, perhaps  
even competing with the main line.  While I don't want to encourage  
forks of my own projects, the potential for increased competition  
does keep us honest.  And I think interested ideas that folks like  
you have Fil, can better compete in the marketplace when they are  
just as first class as the main branch.  IOW, having your own  
branches instead of patches means that the successful ones should be  
able to garner more community support, thus improving the likelihood  
that the main line will accept them.  So I think the jury is still  
out on whether dvcs's increase overall openness or decrease it.  I'm  
putting my money on the former.

Of course, I think it /will/ make our lives harder in some ways.  As  
we've seen, folks like cPanel have their own forks that they modify,  
and then their users come looking to us for support, which we can't  
give them.  Having more public branches out there will increase our  
support costs.  We may need to be more careful about blessing the  
official branches and making it clear (on web page footers and such)  
which is being used.

All that being said, the plight that you, Fil, and others go through,  
and the desire on my part to open up the development process more, is  
a big driving factor for me finally getting off my ass and doing  
something about it.  Moving to a dvcs is the first step.

> The ticket system at Sourceforge is/was almost unusable.

That's a side issue, and one I whole-hearted agree with.  Remember  
that Atlassian has provided us with free hosted Jira, which is just  
waiting for us.  The blocker there is that neither I, nor my contact  
at Atlassian, has had time to complete the SF export and Jira  
import.  A case of e-beers and a year's worth of FLOSS karma goes to  
whoever volunteers to help make this happen.

> So, in the end, I have my own little patch on my personal SVN server,
> which of course almost no one has read, and which evidently got
> outdated, and, well, will stay in that state until I find the time to
> upgrade it again, compare all by hand and test.
>
> I'm not sure a new versioning system can help for this kind of
> problem, but if it can, I'm all for it (though I don't really fancy
> learning yet another versioning system, as I'm very happy with SVN for
> my developments).

I don't think there's any controversy that moving to a dvcs will be  
an overall win for all of us.  Certainly learning bzr was pretty  
easy, an hg looks just as easy.  (More on that next.)_

> Not really an answer, and a bit off-topic, sorry. :)  HTH anyway

Cheers,
- -Barry

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