[Spread-users] Public CVS?

[Jon Stevens]

on 9/18/01 9:44 AM, "Theo Schlossnagle" <jesus at omniti.com> wrote:

> Interesting perspective.  I don't agree or disagree.  I would like to
> know the basic OSS development principles.  Can you point me to
> documentation and/or an RFC?  I am actually very interested and I think
> something like that (if widely accepted) would be very useful.

Most of the documentation I have is based on experience of having helped run
large scale OSS projects since ~1996. Originally, Apache Jserv was not
available under a CVS server. The project nearly died because of this. After
having placed it under control of public CVS (on my personal server), the
project recovered and became hugely popular with hundreds of thousands of
downloads as well as inclusion within other commercial systems (Oracle's
servlet engine used to be based on Jserv). After that, I co-founded the
Jakarta project and have dealt with many users requesting access to public
CVS when we forget to ln -s /home/cvs/PROJECT /home/cvspublic/PROJECT.
Sometimes, requests like this come in within *minutes* of creating a new
project under Jakarta. Needless to say, I think that personally dealing with
thousands of users over many years is worth more than any RFC or published
documentation.

I haven't read this book yet, but I bet it will be good...
<http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/13/1519222>

I don't agree with everything he says, but this is a pretty basic example
from a well read paper:
<http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/x135.
html>
> Indeed, my own most successful single hack previous to fetchmail was probably
> Emacs VC (version control) mode, a Linux-like collaboration by email with
> three other people, only one of whom (Richard Stallman, the author of Emacs
> and founder of the Free Software Foundation) I have met to this day. It was a
> front-end for SCCS, RCS and later CVS from within Emacs that offered
> ``one-touch'' version control operations. It evolved from a tiny, crude
> sccs.el mode somebody else had written. And the development of VC succeeded
> because, unlike Emacs itself, Emacs Lisp code could go through
> release/test/improve generations very quickly.


This one, I helped write:
<http://jakarta.apache.org/site/guidelines.html>


> Odd, I said nothing about commits.  In fact I am the _only_ person who
> commits to mod_backhand.  If someone else showed tremendous interest in
> adding new features, I would consider allowing commit access, but it is
> the _viewing_ that _I_ find that justifies the project.  Much more
> valuable is the info I get from the "download" form.  It gives me hints
> that someone may have discussed mod_backhand at a tutorial or a
> conference if there is bursty download behaviour.
> 
> Again, I will reiterate that I was speaking about the projects that _I_
> maintain.  Spread is not one of them.

Commits or downloads. Why do they have to be tied to specific individual
people?

-jon