One week of infrastructure issues [LWN.net]

One week of infrastructure issues

Posted Aug 22, 2008 0:06 UTC (Fri) by gman (subscriber, #40493)
In reply to: One week of infrastructure issues by jspaleta
Parent article: One week of infrastructure issues

While that process has certainly been true of the past, things are progressing. OpenSolaris has now had a successful migration from Teamware to Mercurial internally, and the next phase is to push that gate outside the firewall. Once this happens, people will be able to commit directly to the kernel (though, much of the review process will still be in place). The bug tracker is still internal (due to confidentiality issues), though we now have a bugzilla instance (defect.opensolaris.org) that many project groups are using.

There is obviously still a significant amount of work to be where we want to be.

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One week of infrastructure issues

Posted Aug 22, 2008 2:54 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Yes opening up infrastructure and and shaking up an existing established workflow inside a
company fence line takes time and non-trivial effort.  Both from an engineering standpoint and
from a legal standpoint.  If doing that work is OpenSolaris's intentions then I applaud the
effort and I look forward to each of the incremental steps as  they take place.  Its hard work
clearing internal company hurdles to make those incremental steps happen.  

Just what ever you do, don't reach for or build a new set of proprietary tools to form the
basis of your community infrastructure and community contribution process.  Don't build your
own launchpad.  If you can avoid that trap, and take advantage of existing open tech or if you
have to build your own open tech... it will pay off when your community wants to help adjust
the community facing tools, because they'll be able to step in and do it for themselves. 

Human code review isn't the issue, someone will always have to be the final say on some issue
and for something like the kernel that person should be someone who is deeply invovled in its
development. Not going to get any arguments from me there.  Cultivating deeply technical
community contribution is a process in itself. It starts with code access, and then it grows
via development process participation, and then in culminates in development process
leadership in new areas...areas your company didn't really think about at the beginning of the
process of opening up. 

-jef