[Spread-users] CVS access to Spread

[Theo E. Schlossnagle]

Jon Stevens wrote:
> Nope. However, I will assert that truly successful OSS projects with lots of
> committers do have anonymous CVS access.

Agreed.  But, until the committing base for Spread grows, I think we can 
safely separate "successful" and "lots of committers" as being unrelated.  As 
the project grow, policies can change.

With something like Spread you have a situation like postgres.  Many of the 
pieces are _very very_ complicated and need to be reviewed by an "expert in 
the field" to assure they don't break gauranteed semantics.  So, the 
maintainer must play a deep and involved roll on patch approval.

Apache is very different.  The Apache software "product" is much much larger. 
  It has many components in the same CVS.  Like APR: not too many people touch 
that other than Ryan.  I would think that having a large number of committers 
could/would jeopardize the integrity of Spread's operation.

People (in general) understand much less about group communication systems, 
the semantics they provide, and their internal implementations that they do 
about the analogous things in a relation database or web server.

> What *exactly* does that gain you other than higher overhead for everyone
> involved?

It eliminates the use of pserver.  So you have less services to worry about on 
your system.  If there is an exploit against the pserver code it will not 
effect overall system security.  Basically, just to reduce the number of 
things the system administrator must maintain.

It also provides a more "user transparent" mechanism of running different 
remote cvs roots of the same machine (on different ports).

> Simple solution (that the ASF employees):
> Contributions are required to be under the ASF License (in your case,
> Spread's License) and copyright to the ASF (in your case, the same copyright
> that Spread is under).
> I just saw the other message from Yair confirming this...

My only point was that this was not formally dictate anywhere.  Now that it 
is, there problem is solved :-)

> Where did you get that I'm standing in anyone's way or even trying to? I
> want things open. Nothing more, nothing less.

The forking comment -- mothing more, nothing less :-)  Perhaps I 
misinterpreted.  I would not generally consider such a comment productive for 
a project that has _just_ opened its doors.  It wouldn't imagine it would give 
the maintainers a warm fuzzy feeling, at least it didn't give me one.
-- 
Theo Schlossnagle
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