Richard A. Guay wrote:
>
> Sorry. A of the posts caught me in a bad mood after listening to
> people just whining all the time at work! It is never productive to
> whine! Please, offer suggestion to get things working. Like
> instead of one maintainer, split the tasks up like the Debian group
> does among many maintainers. Many maintainers of different parts of
> the code might make it harder to organize everything, but it might
> keep one person from getting worked to death!
Before I actually did much looking at the fvwm2 code I noticed the lack of
progress and I privately suggested basically just this to Chuck about 3
weeks ago.
And I also like what "Eric S. Raymond" <esr_at_snark.thyrsus.com> has written
about the "Cathedral and Bazaar" models of software development. He's
attributed the success of Linux to the bazaar model. He has written and
talked about this and you can find TEXT and REAL AUDIO of his talk at
http://www.ccil.org/~esr/writings/
I like the way that the Apache group handles this... Here's a trimmed down
version of ABOUT_APACHE from the apache-1.2.0 distribution....
The Apache HTTP Server Project
http://www.apache.org/
June 1997
The Apache Project is a collaborative software development effort aimed
at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely-available
source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server. The project is
jointly managed by a group of volunteers located around the world, using
the Internet and the Web to communicate, plan, and develop the server and
its related documentation. These volunteers are known as the Apache Group.
In addition, hundreds of users have contributed ideas, code, and
documentation to the project. This file is intended to briefly describe
the history of the Apache Group, recognize the many contributors, and
explain how you can join the fun too.
[...]
============================================================================
How to join the Apache Group
There are several levels of contributing. If you just want to send
in an occasional suggestion/fix, then you can just use the bug reporting
form at <
http://www.apache.org/bugdb.cgi>. You can also subscribe to the
announcements mailing list (apache-announce_at_apache.org) which we use to
broadcast information about new releases, bugfixes, and upcoming events.
If you'd like to become an active member of the Apache Group (the group
of volunteers who vote on changes to the distributed server), then
you need to start by subscribing to the new-httpd_at_apache.org mailing list.
One warning though: traffic is high, 1000 to 1500 messages/month.
To subscribe to the list, send "subscribe new-httpd" in the body of
a message to <majordomo_at_apache.org>. We recommend reading the list for
a while before trying to jump in to development.
NOTE: The developer mailing list (new-httpd_at_apache.org) is not
a user support forum; it is for people actively working on development
of the server code and documentation, and for planning future
directions. If you have user/configuration questions, send them
to the USENET newsgroup "comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix".
The Apache Group is a meritocracy -- the more work you have done, the more
you are allowed to do. The group founders set the original rules, but
they can be changed by vote of the active members. There is a core group
of people who have logins on our server (hyperreal.com) and access to the
CVS repository. Everyone has access to the CVS snapshots. Changes to
the code are proposed on the mailing list and usually voted on by active
members -- three +1 (yes votes) and no -1 (no votes, or vetoes) are needed
to commit a code change during a release cycle; docs are usually committed
first and then changed as needed, with conflicts resolved by majority vote.
Our primary method of communication is our mailing list. Approximately 40
messages a day flow over the list, and are typically very conversational in
tone. We discuss new features to add, bug fixes, user problems, developments
in the web server community, release dates, etc. The actual code development
takes place on the developers' local machines, with proposed changes
communicated using a patch (output of a context "diff -c3 oldfile newfile"
command), and committed to the source repository by one of the core
developers using remote CVS.
New members of the Apache Group are added when a frequent contributor is
nominated by one member and unanimously approved by the voting members.
In most cases, this "new" member has been actively contributing to the
group's work for over six months, so it's usually an easy decision.
Anyone on the mailing list can vote on a particular issue, but we only
count those made by active members or people who are known to be experts
on that part of the server. Vetoes must be accompanied by a convincing
explanation.
The above describes our past and current (as of June 1997) guidelines,
which will probably change over time as the membership of the group
changes and our development/coordination tools improve.
[...]
============================================================================
Roy Fielding, June 1997
If you are interested in other WWW history, see <
http://www.webhistory.org/>
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Received on Mon Jul 07 1997 - 12:40:07 BST