[Spread-users] Public CVS?

[Jonathan Stanton]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 12:25:57PM -0700, Jon Stevens wrote:
> on 9/15/01 9:38 PM, "Jonathan Stanton" <jonathan at cnds.jhu.edu> wrote:
> 
> > The current CVS server does not allow anonymous access, but anyone
> > requesting access is granted it. Right now about 8 people internal to
> > CNDS have accounts and 6 people external to CNDS have accounts. We hashed
> > out the issue of what type of CVS access to provide about a month ago and
> > chose not to provide anonymous access for now. We don't plan to change
> > that in the immediate future unless the situation changes, but want to
> > keep an open mind as the project and community evolve.
> 
> I guess I should go now and check a copy of the source code into anon CVS on
> sourceforge.

No one has ever said to me (at least) why they want anonymous cvs and what
it gives them that they do not have right now. I know a number of projects
do have anonymous cvs, but even more do not have any cvs at all. 

I want to support anyone who wants to be a part of Spread, but that does
not extend to being anyone's servant who does what he is told. In the same
way you are free to do anything you want, that is permitted by the
license, but what I think is better is for us to work together. If you
want to work on Spread, just go ahead, use cvs yourself to manage your
changes and if you want to contribute them, lets talk about the patches on
the list and merge them. Right now most of the Spread development occurs
at the lab so that is what we spend our time on. As more of the work is
done outside the project will have to evolve to support that different set
of developers.

> Also, I still haven't seen an answer to my question:
> 
> > If not, why?

I believed this had been discussed a month ago and did not want to rehash
it. I still do not want to do that, and do not have time to. Others were
involved in that discussion.

I view cvs as a technical tool that provides certain services. If there is
a service you cannot get from what we have setup right now (besides
anonymity), tell us (and the list) and we can see how to achieve that
service if it is useful and good for everyone.

> No offense, but so far at least 6 people have requested it. How many more
> votes do you need?

I didn't believe it was an election. I view projects, especially ones as
small as Spread, to work on consensus, not democracy. When they get large
enough that everyone can't have a conversation together and agree, then
you go the next step to more scalable management and decision making but
Spread is not anywhere near that size yet.

One suggestion someone had was an automated web form that generates cvs
accounts. I do want to do that and hopefully will get it working sometime
soon.

Jonathan

-- 
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Jonathan R. Stanton         jonathan at cs.jhu.edu
Dept. of Computer Science   
Johns Hopkins University    
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