[Axiom-developer] Community

[daly]

COMMUNITY

Having just spend the last 3.5 months trying to construct a merger of
Waldek's version, Gaby's version, my work, and the Gold version I find
this whole process very tedious.  The SVN versions have diverged
wildly in structure from the Arch/CVS versions and the time has come
to restructure the way we work.

Its fine to have your own branch and its fine to experiment with new
ideas. But we don't seem to be acting as a "community".  The primary
evidence is the frequent reference to "Waldek's Version" or "Gaby's
Version" or the "Gold Version", as if in competition.

This isn't the way that "community-based" projects work. I don't ever
recall anyone suggesting "Bob's GCC" or "Jane's Mozilla" or "Bill's
Apache". If you want a change to GCC you need to work as part of a
community and get the change accepted into the savannah sources.

There are "versions" in Linux. You can get a copy of Andrew Morton's
version of the kernel. You can build your own kernel.  You can get
specialized kernels for special machines. But, in general, when
referring to "the kernel" you are referring to the one maintained by
linus at kernel.org. Linus is not going to reach out to your special
version and try to merge it.

The Axiom Gold version lives in Arch on axiom-developer.org and is
also publicly mirrored into CVS at sourceforge and CVS at savannah.

Following the linux model some portion of your time needs to be spent
"packaging" your changes so they can fit into Axiom. Without this
effort you are fragmenting the very small community we have.

The process for "packaging" changes has been well documented for a
number of years. This involves collecting up a group of changes, such
as the elimination of prototypes, into a changeset that can be applied
against Gold. These are published as a set of diff -Naur changes.

So far I have seen no changesets against Gold, no "packaging" effort,
no community-directed effort.

Please give some thought to community-directed effort.

Tim