2009/7/30 William Stein <wst...@gmail.com>: > Hi, > > There is an article on slashdot today about the CentOS project admin being > AWOL: > > http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/130249/CentOS-Project-Administrator-Goes-AWOL?art_pos=4 > > "Lance Davis, the main project administrator for CentOS, a popular free > 'rebuild' of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, appears to have gone AWOL. In an > open letter from his fellow CentOS developers, they describe the precarious > situation the project has been put in. There have been attempts to contact > him for some time now, as he's the sole administrator for the centos.org > domain, the IRC channels, and apparently, CentOS funds. One can only hope > that Lance gets in contact with them and gets things sorted out."
<SNIP> > As some of you may have noticed, Sage recently had a similar situation, in > that in late May Michael Abshoff went AWOL -- he posted one message in May > that he was taking a break for a month, and has not been heard from since. > Since he was doing essentially all release management, porting, trac > account creation, etc., we are fortunate that him going AWOL hasn't impacted > the Sage project very badly, in that with a bunch of work we were able to > adapt. True. > That said, I think it would be really beneficial for people > involved with Sage to think through other scenarios and come up with a way > to make our project more robust. For example, what if *I* was AWOL for a > while? Passwords are clearly an issue, but IMHO, if nobody knew any root passwords (which is clearly not the case) and nobody knew the the domain name info (which you said is not the case), those would not result in a catastrophic failure of the project. We all have the source code, domain names are cheap. What Sage would probably lack most if you went AWOL would be a sense of direction. Different people would probably emerge with different views about how the project should go. That in in self could potentially create multiple forks. There could be numerous well meaning strongly held views - for example. * Let's have a feature-freeze for a year, and add no new packages, just fixing bugs. * Let's target the areas where Mathematica could be considered to have some advantages and dont worry about areas where Sage is clearly better than Mathematica (e.g. number theory). * The proect was started by a someone whose main interest was number theory, so in his honor, lets concentrate on number theory. * Let us forget about Solaris & FreeBSD, as they are not as widely used as Linux or Windows. * Lets forget about about anything other than Windows. More people use Windows than any other platform, so any code that does not help the windows port will not be accepted. * Let's change the licence to the GPL3 * Let's not add any code unless it builds with Sun's compiler. * Let's move the project to Sourceforge, or similar site. * Any new code added must build with the latest version of gcc, as well as one two years old. * Let's spend any money we can get by advertising in New Scientist. * Let's concentrate on adding features which allow Sage to be useful to 8 year old school children. * Let's not 'dumb-down' the project. * Multi-core computers are the thing of the future. Hence no new code should be added to the standard distribution unless it's multi-threaded in cases where a parallel algorithms is known. * Let's spend what money we can and hire professional management consultants (To debate ANYTHING of the above list now would be seriously off-topic and should got to flame-wars) I believe it's possible the most serious threat would be a widely different set of views about the direction the project should take. At the moment you are providing a direction. I don't know the answer. It would be worth perhaps looking at how very successful projects work. The Apache foundation was the first that came to my mind. I believe they have various committee members. The committees can tend to wast huge amounts of time. As I say, I don't claim to know the answer, but I see a lack of direction as being an issue. Dave --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
