osdf-devteam team mailing list archive

[Sam Hart <criswellious@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 8:23 AM, Toast McFarland <toast@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Yes, but primarily cleaning up launchpad itself so it more accurately
> reflects what's going on. What I'm really shooting for is getting a few more
> of the 13 team members to get in there and throw in their two cents. ;)

Well, right now there seems to be a lot of site theming work in there,
which probably doesn't appeal to everyone, so you can't expect a
random person to just dive into it.

As for 'cleaning up launchpad', it could be I'm misunderstanding it,
but in every other launchpad-like open-source project tracker like it
I've ever worked with it would be considered uncouth to go and remove
another person's branch simply because I felt a project tracker needed
"clean-up".

I suspect that what is troubling you about it may be more reflective
of the fact that we haven't exactly laid down any sort of rules or
best practices for the project's code and tracker. It *may* be what
your saying is we need something like that set up to wrangle things
like this in the future.

As an example, let's pick a semi-random Launchpad hosted project, InkScape:
 * https://launchpad.net/inkscape

Picking one of the developers on that project, JazzyNico, we see *he*
has a local branch for InkScape which he maintains and fiddles with:
* https://code.launchpad.net/~jazzynico

The idea here is that JazzyNico keeps his local branch, messes with
things there, and then either when he feels comfortable enough for a
push (or, if he doesn't have permission and has to request a pull-
I'll be honest, I haven't checked on the InkScape project, I'm just
illustrating a workflow :-) his changes are pushed/pulled/merged with
the upstream InkScape branch.

A workflow like this *can* help keep the project's tracker clean and
can make things easier to manage (usually :-)

I have some code I am going to be pushing that utilizes the Sunlight
Foundation's API, and I was going to be doing this same basic workflow
(except using my own launchpad user page, of course).

Bear in mind that workflows like this *only* work as long as they
"don't get in your way". And in a "Real Open Source Project(tm)"
things tend to get messy. Going back to the InkScape example, its code
page is an even bigger mess than OSDF's,
https://code.launchpad.net/inkscape (they have code that hasn't been
touched in 100+ weeks!) So I'm not so certain you should feel that
ashamed by the OSDF's code page :-)

                                      ---Sam