Re: Membership request for group GNU LilyPond Music Typesetter

[Graham Percival]

Having more people doing smaller tasks is completely deliberate.
If you're only responsible for 30 minutes of work each week, you
won't get burned out, and you really can't pretend that you're too
busy to find those 30 minutes somewhere.

OTOH, if you do two hours of work each day, you get burned out
really quickly.


The idea of forks is interesting, but at the end of the day, the
maintainer still needs to pull these changes.  If the maintainer
just pulls the new material blindly, then I can't see any real
advantage over giving people git access directly.  If the
maintainer reviews each commit carefully, then he's back to
spending hours reviewing material.  Not to mention the extra
overhead of all the separate branches pulling from everybody else,
and requiring that much more git knowledge and potential
conflicts.


Basically, it comes down to this: I'm spending 1 to 4 hours
*each day* managing all the non-git-access contributors.  Most of
these are limited-term projects (GDP), so we can omit them from
future consideration, but there's still some ongoing tasks.

I'm gone in three months.  This leaves three options:
1. lose all the extra contributors.
2. have the extra contributors send material to somebody else (you?
  John?), and that other person starts spending an hour a day
dealing with this stuff.  Or maybe only deal with them once a
week, potentially dealing with them in 3 hours a week... but then
you might lose half the contributors.  People don't like waiting a
week for feedback; I think that one of the reasons GDP has
worked out is that 95% I respond within 24 hours.
3. start giving trusted, reliable contributors git access.

I favor #3, of course.

Cheers,
- Graham


On Mon, 26 May 2008 17:37:25 -0300
"Han-Wen Nienhuys" <address@hidden> wrote:

> i'll look at this when I get home, but I have the feeling that the
> number of people that need commit access is getting larger than it
> needs be - we keep adding people that only do relatively small tasks.
> 
> Repo.or.cz has this concept of forks, where people can fork off a
> project cheaply, and the maintainer can issue a pull when the time has
> come to integrate the change. Would this be a useful feature for
> savannah too?  OTOH, giving people commit access might lower the
> barrier to them contributing useful other changes?