[DRE-maint] Regarding your comment in my blog (re: Ruby Gems)

Micah Anderson micah at riseup.net
Tue Dec 9 19:14:01 UTC 2008


* Richard Hurt <rnhurt at kangaroobox.com> [2008-12-09 12:41-0500]:
>
> Actually, I agree that CVS/SVN is easier to get started with than Git.  
> However, the long term benefits of Git are much greater.  Heck I'm just 

I would agree that the long term benefits of git are much greater, and
the collaboration with upstream is made significantly easier.

Although its true that the team hasn't run into any limits with SVN that
have required it to switch, I think that probably most people on the
team are familiar with git and switching would probably not be that
problematic overall. 

>>>  - Why are we still using mailman and not something more flexible?
>>
>> This strikes me as kind of funny. Googlegroups is a modern OSS tool? I
>> personally find Googlegroups to be frustrating and annoying for
>> non-Google users to subscribe/post. Using it through GMANE is a
>> nightmare, there is no NOMAIL option for individual users, you have to
>> get the list admin to do it.
>>
>> I have much less confidence that switching away from MailMan to
>> GoogleGroups will have a tangible benefit. Is it so hard to subscribe 
>> to
>> a MailMan list? After you have subscribed, what is the barrier here?
>> Seriously, I am baffled about this one.
>
> The big thing for me was visibility.  Its hard to intelligently search  
> for old messages and browsing them once you find them is not pretty.   
> Heck, I even had a hard time finding the archive in the first place.

You are right that the default archiver for Mailman is not that
great. However, you can use google to search the archives, without
handing over the entire bag to them. 

> I don't specifically like or dislike Google Groups but Usenet was
> designed for this type of discussion and GG sure do make it easy to
> navigate.

I agree that Usenet was designed for this kind of discussion, and that
is why I prefer to use GMANE for reading these types of mailing
lists. The benefits of GMANE are quite nice especially when the
mechanism for interfacing with it and its archives are independent of
the delivery transport. In otherwords, if you prefer to read this list
with an RSS reader, an email reader, a news reader (I use Gnus), a web
browser... you can. Because I use a newsreader, I find the searching
problem you mention totally solved. I can load all the old articles in a
flick of the wrist and then search through them intelligently. I
recently crawled through all the GnuPG mailing list archives from over
ten years ago, looking for a specific topic. This all is done without
google.


>> I think its a good idea to try and get more involvement from the Ruby
>> community, and get more people involved. However, I am very suspicious
>> that switching away from MailMan is going to bring in a rush of
>> people....
>
> No, but making the onbaording process simple and clear would at least  
> not scare people away.  I guess my frustration stems from the fact that 
> all the tools we are using are completely separate with nothing tying 
> them together.  For instance, we have Gforge on the front end, mailman 

I can see this as being problematic. The website should have everything
tied together cohesively by providing you with the paths that you need
to get at what you need. However, you seem to be talking about a much
tighter integration that could be nice for some people, but not for
others. 

> for the mailing lists, SVN to handle the code, and to top it all off the 
> main site is a wiki hosted somewhere else.  None of these tools work 
> together and there is almost nothing tying them to each other.

What would tie them together, besides links and maybe a shared
authentication? When you create an alioth account, and get access to a
project, you have a lot of this already tied together... Sure you dont
automatically get subscribed to the mailing list, but you now have
access to the SVN repository, and the mailing lists are already there.

> One suggestion is that we move everything to Gforge.  It should be able 
> to handle mailing lists, code versioning, documentation, and bug  
> tracking and if it can't then we should look elsewhere.

Alioth (running Gforge) is already setup and it handles the mailing
lists, the code versioning, the website/documentation is not there, but
probably easily could be. The part I disagree with is the bug tracking,
the Debian BTS seems perfect for the job.

I now realize where you are coming from, you are working on the Redmine
package and this has everything integrated. I like Redmine a lot, I use
it and I can't wait for the Debian package to be available. I find it is
significantly better than Trac, for what it does. However, I think the
pieces that Redmine provides already exist in the Debian infrastructure
(although Redmine doesn't provide mailing lists, nor does it handle
repository access). It would be interesting if someone made some kind of
BTS gateway to Redmine, so that people who wanted to use that interface
for managing bugs, could... but it wouldn't detract from the existing
BTS that developers know and love for its simple power it offers.

micah
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers/attachments/20081209/31e2d010/attachment.pgp 


More information about the Pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers mailing list