Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Thu, 2015-05-28 at 21:20 +0200, Egmont Koblinger wrote: Another thing that occurred to me: to save on long term development costs, we should simplify the codebase and get rid of alternatives. Hi Egmont, These are all good points, and I generally agree, but it would be good to first estimate how much code removing a particular feature would allow us to get rid of, and then decide on this basis. On one hand, I guess, SLang can go, but on the other hand, it appears to be still actively maintained, and mutt, for instance, can compile against both SLang and ncurses, just as mc. Also, there are still quite some users of 8bit locales, and I'm not so sure whether it would be a good idea to drop everything except for utf-8 just like that. Unlike you, however, I still haven't had a deeper look into the charset stuff, so maybe there is a possibility to cut down on branching without completely dropping 8bit. In what concerns glib regex vs. pcre, I'm still not sure what's the advantage of using glib wrappers for that, but it seems that using pcre directly would at least allow us to control the crashing on invalid utf-8 things stuff, so maybe getting rid of glib regex would be a good thing. If you'd be willing to investigate any of these avenues, that would of course be great :-) -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Thu, 2015-05-28 at 12:11 +0200, Egmont Koblinger wrote: I disagree that a 20hrs/week commitment is required from someone. I don't think it's the right model, and we're unlikely to find anyone. There were times (about a year ago) when I had tons of time to contribute, yet mainstream dev's resources were the bottleneck in reviewing these changes. At other times they were active but I didn't have time to contribute. Just for the record, I didn't mean to say that mc should have only one maintainer who will contribute 20 hpw on a sustained basis. I was implying that this is my estimate for the minimal amount of workload to keep the project in a reasonable shape, but whether it comes from one person, or from 3 collaborating maintainers, I don't care :-) Of course, the more maintainers there are, the better, and I'd say 3x7 is actually better than 1x20 if only for the bus factor. On the other hand, I don't think that 7 hpw per person is very meaningful. In the last 2 weeks I struggled to extract 10 hpw, and they were gone in a split second. Anyways, thank you very much for your work on mc codebase, and g-t, which is still my favorite terminal emulator that I'm using every day; I can see the effect of your work very directly in terms of annoying bugs being fixed that have been haunting me for quite awhile... -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Hello, On Thu, 28 May 2015 12:11:04 +0200 Egmont Koblinger egm...@gmail.com wrote: Hi guys, [] Instead, I believe it should be a core with 3-5 people who have similar working style and similar vision of the project, and each contribute just a few hours per week. Yes. And generally, it would be nice if these people would be driven not by personal ambitions of something to do regarding mc, but by desire to serve community. And their core responsibilities would be to process submissions, and guide contributors into producing patches suitable for merging. [] I'd be happy to see Mooffie on the team right away, his work (along with his style and the contents of the homepage) totally convinced me. There's concern (which Mooffie himself raises) of de-anonymization. Indeed, for a tool which can be run as root, it would be nice to know who's really that guy who maintains it. I'm sorry to say this, but I myself cannot guarantee anything and cannot make any commitments. I'm spending a long vacation right now where I was planning to do some coding on my primary hobby project (gnome-terminal), and maybe address one or two issues on my secondary hobby project (mc); all subject to my mood. After this vacation I'll start a new job which will require 100% of me. So I'd rather stay an occasional contributor as I am now, and not devote myself to anything with mc. Thanks for finding time to respond during your vacation. But there's a bit of contradiction: you said that you would have Moofie on the team, but then say you can't make *any* commitments (we're already on the same line that there can't be any extraordinary commitments like 20hrs/week or something). So, let me just ask: what do you think should be done now (refarding this whole maintainership situation), and in what timeframe? It would be very nice if there was fresh start right from the start, otherwise it's just the same situation as before: the procrastination, and most people don't know what and how it will be. G-t is my personal hobby project in the sense that I do hunt down and address bugs that cause problems to other people but I myself don't particularly care about. Mc never reached this level for me, I never took time to look at bugs and patches that I myself wasn't personally interested in. Don't ask me why it turned out this way, I don't know - maybe it was because on g-t I got quick feedback of my work, whereas on mc I often had to wait for so long that I almost lost interest, and often missed the free time I had when I could have worked on these issues. Yes, feedback people get on first submission and overall impression is very important. That's why I think that timely responses and formal criteria for processing patches (instead of I don't like) are very important. And that's IMHO what maintainers should work on, anything else can be done by community as guides by maintainers. As for the current segfault issue, I think the broken change should be reverted for now and a .15 released until we come up with a proper solution. I won't say this is obvious, I just say +1. Giant thanks to you guys who maintained this project for years, I'm sad to see you go, and wish you all the best! That's certainly true, and there're a lot to learn from them (while some things to change too). Again, would be nice to have timely and smooth transition, while they still in loop and oversee/help with various issues. e. -- Best regards, Paul mailto:pmis...@gmail.com ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Hello, On Sat, 30 May 2015 13:56:54 +0200 Oswald Buddenhagen oswald.buddenha...@gmx.de wrote: On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 02:08:37PM +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: On Sat, 30 May 2015 11:53:58 +0200 Oswald Buddenhagen oswald.buddenha...@gmx.de wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 12:46:08AM +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: You again trying to over-complicate. Start from a clean page on github, while invite community to migrate issues from trac to github. Most content on trac from people who gave up on mc long ago. It makes sense to process what active people are interested in and leave old stuff where it is. nonsense. the old infrastructure is going to disappear at some point, and everything on it will be lost. it is entirely irrelevant that many of the people lost interest - most of the issues are still valid, and a lot of time went into discussing solutions. it would be plain stupid to throw this away, never mind the disregard for other people's work. I didn't propose to throw it away. I proposed to leave it where it is for now and work on github issues/patches (which are also issues/patches, surprise), while ask help from wider community to migrate issues to github. If/when new maintainers ran out of github issues, they certainly will look into trac themselves, either at individual issues, or en-masse migration. The talk is about smooth start for new maintainers without extraordinary efforts. i think you are being a tad overly optimistic here. And you, as few other folks, try to frighten away people with how hard it is. What's the point, what's the plan with such behavior? Hope that someone else will come and tell, yeah, I have 20hrs/week, and I already brought bucket and a mop to start cleaning your Augean stables? Previous cases show that it takes 1+ year for such event to happen, which is not smooth transition at all. just for some perspective: a year ago or so i went through the effort of un-botching the previous import. more than half a decade after the fact. at this rate, there is no reason whatsoever to think that the infra will still be even there when somebody finally feels like doing a migration (midnight-commander.org is owned privately by slavaz). I know, hope Slava/Yury/whoever can maintain it, say, till the end of this year. Again, not doing anything at all and waiting for a knight to save it won't help either. also, the longer you wait, the more work gets duplicated, and the harder it will be to merge the data sets in a useful way. Let's get to a productive tone: your help with the migration will be much welcome and appreciated. that's why i would expect some serious commitment to a migration from somebody who wants to take over with the blessing of the previous maintainers. Sorry, but you cannot expect anything like that. Everything will be done on best effort basis, just the same as was done before, and as always the case with OpenSource projects. Acceptance is the first step. If that is achieved, we can discuss technical and organizational/personal commitments aspects. [] So, you started an argument in githib ticket, then came here just to criticize and repeat 'tis not possible? there is no contradiction whatsoever in that. i can review and discuss despite full awareness that i won't be able to put a final stamp of approval under it. No problem, but there should be finite time put into that, we can't go in circles forever or even too long. Come on, time for productive actions - are *you* ready to be a maintainer? no. exactly because i lack the time (or personal motivation) to make the commitment. it's not like i haven't been tempted during a decade of lurking. Indeed, we talk here not about the best solution, but of not allowing the worst, when project went unmaintained for a prolonged time, and at the same time improving some aspects wrt previous practices. -- Best regards, Paul mailto:pmis...@gmail.com ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Hello, On Sat, 30 May 2015 11:53:58 +0200 Oswald Buddenhagen oswald.buddenha...@gmx.de wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 12:46:08AM +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: On Wed, 27 May 2015 22:28:15 +0200 Yury V. Zaytsev y...@shurup.com wrote: For example, one could have set up a script to import Trac tickets into Github Issues. There are many half-way working scripts floating around, but they need testing and fixing. Last time, Savannah import into Trac took quite some effort, but it turned out to be very worthwhile. You again trying to over-complicate. Start from a clean page on github, while invite community to migrate issues from trac to github. Most content on trac from people who gave up on mc long ago. It makes sense to process what active people are interested in and leave old stuff where it is. nonsense. the old infrastructure is going to disappear at some point, and everything on it will be lost. it is entirely irrelevant that many of the people lost interest - most of the issues are still valid, and a lot of time went into discussing solutions. it would be plain stupid to throw this away, never mind the disregard for other people's work. I didn't propose to throw it away. I proposed to leave it where it is for now and work on github issues/patches (which are also issues/patches, surprise), while ask help from wider community to migrate issues to github. If/when new maintainers ran out of github issues, they certainly will look into trac themselves, either at individual issues, or en-masse migration. The talk is about smooth start for new maintainers without extraordinary efforts. I have couple of my patches accepted into mc (trivial, yes, it's on a non-trivial thing I stuck due to lack of discussion), so pass one criteria I myself proposed. My maintainership program would be: 1. Tear off all the unmaintainable code. see, statements like that make me hope very much that you never get direct write access to the repository. Certainly I'm keen to provide full disclosure of my programme, so people aren't surprised later. As for being a maintainer, I'm certainly hope that there will be more suitable people to take that role. But I was asked would I take maintainership myself, and I provided the answer. 3. Require patches with good descriptions (including references), try to respond to pull requests quickly with suggestion, close those which weren't got into shape in 1 month as unmaintainable. that's a nice plan, but requires a quite substantial committment to put into action. which brings us back to yury's conclusions. So, you started an argument in githib ticket, then came here just to criticize and repeat 'tis not possible? Come on, time for productive actions - are *you* ready to be a maintainer? What's *your* maintainership plan? -- Best regards, Paul mailto:pmis...@gmail.com ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 12:46:08AM +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: On Wed, 27 May 2015 22:28:15 +0200 Yury V. Zaytsev y...@shurup.com wrote: For example, one could have set up a script to import Trac tickets into Github Issues. There are many half-way working scripts floating around, but they need testing and fixing. Last time, Savannah import into Trac took quite some effort, but it turned out to be very worthwhile. You again trying to over-complicate. Start from a clean page on github, while invite community to migrate issues from trac to github. Most content on trac from people who gave up on mc long ago. It makes sense to process what active people are interested in and leave old stuff where it is. nonsense. the old infrastructure is going to disappear at some point, and everything on it will be lost. it is entirely irrelevant that many of the people lost interest - most of the issues are still valid, and a lot of time went into discussing solutions. it would be plain stupid to throw this away, never mind the disregard for other people's work. I have couple of my patches accepted into mc (trivial, yes, it's on a non-trivial thing I stuck due to lack of discussion), so pass one criteria I myself proposed. My maintainership program would be: 1. Tear off all the unmaintainable code. see, statements like that make me hope very much that you never get direct write access to the repository. 3. Require patches with good descriptions (including references), try to respond to pull requests quickly with suggestion, close those which weren't got into shape in 1 month as unmaintainable. that's a nice plan, but requires a quite substantial committment to put into action. which brings us back to yury's conclusions. ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 02:08:37PM +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: On Sat, 30 May 2015 11:53:58 +0200 Oswald Buddenhagen oswald.buddenha...@gmx.de wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 12:46:08AM +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: You again trying to over-complicate. Start from a clean page on github, while invite community to migrate issues from trac to github. Most content on trac from people who gave up on mc long ago. It makes sense to process what active people are interested in and leave old stuff where it is. nonsense. the old infrastructure is going to disappear at some point, and everything on it will be lost. it is entirely irrelevant that many of the people lost interest - most of the issues are still valid, and a lot of time went into discussing solutions. it would be plain stupid to throw this away, never mind the disregard for other people's work. I didn't propose to throw it away. I proposed to leave it where it is for now and work on github issues/patches (which are also issues/patches, surprise), while ask help from wider community to migrate issues to github. If/when new maintainers ran out of github issues, they certainly will look into trac themselves, either at individual issues, or en-masse migration. The talk is about smooth start for new maintainers without extraordinary efforts. i think you are being a tad overly optimistic here. just for some perspective: a year ago or so i went through the effort of un-botching the previous import. more than half a decade after the fact. at this rate, there is no reason whatsoever to think that the infra will still be even there when somebody finally feels like doing a migration (midnight-commander.org is owned privately by slavaz). also, the longer you wait, the more work gets duplicated, and the harder it will be to merge the data sets in a useful way. that's why i would expect some serious commitment to a migration from somebody who wants to take over with the blessing of the previous maintainers. 3. Require patches with good descriptions (including references), try to respond to pull requests quickly with suggestion, close those which weren't got into shape in 1 month as unmaintainable. that's a nice plan, but requires a quite substantial committment to put into action. which brings us back to yury's conclusions. So, you started an argument in githib ticket, then came here just to criticize and repeat 'tis not possible? there is no contradiction whatsoever in that. i can review and discuss despite full awareness that i won't be able to put a final stamp of approval under it. Come on, time for productive actions - are *you* ready to be a maintainer? no. exactly because i lack the time (or personal motivation) to make the commitment. it's not like i haven't been tempted during a decade of lurking. ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Sat, 2015-05-30 at 14:08 +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: But I was asked would I take maintainership myself, and I provided the answer. Sorry, I missed the answer in your numerous emails. My understanding was that there was no answer, that is you don't want to make any clear commitments yourself, but rather prefer to consult other people as to how they should proceed, is that right? If not, it would be helpful to know how much time and how regularly you are ready to commit, and what exactly you are going to be working on. If yes, then I'll rather not answer the rest of the mails, because it's going to cost me many hours. I'll try to post my own plan separately as time permits. -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Sat, 2015-05-30 at 13:56 +0200, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote: (midnight-commander.org is owned privately by slavaz). Just to set the record straight: 1) The domain itself is now paid managed by me through a collective account, to which Slava and the rest of the team have access to. 2) In what concerns the server, after the last crash, I have arranged a virtual machine at OSUOSL, where all the stuff that used to run on the old box has been moved. I've also moved the downloads to OSUOSL mirroring infrastructure sometime later. 3) The builders are owned privately by me, but I will have to decommission them at some point soon and will set up Travis instead. 4) The rest is various hosted services to which multiple people, usually me and Slava have access to. -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Yury, That's the reason to decommission existing infrastructure asap - you pay for the things that work against your productivity. I see that you not so interested in migration as you didn't answer my question in private. So I'm asking it here: 1) What db backend do you use in trac? 2) I'm ready to help you with migration to git. Do YOU ready for that? On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 8:05 AM, Yury V. Zaytsev y...@shurup.com wrote: On Sat, 2015-05-30 at 13:56 +0200, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote: (midnight-commander.org is owned privately by slavaz). Just to set the record straight: 1) The domain itself is now paid managed by me through a collective account, to which Slava and the rest of the team have access to. 2) In what concerns the server, after the last crash, I have arranged a virtual machine at OSUOSL, where all the stuff that used to run on the old box has been moved. I've also moved the downloads to OSUOSL mirroring infrastructure sometime later. 3) The builders are owned privately by me, but I will have to decommission them at some point soon and will set up Travis instead. 4) The rest is various hosted services to which multiple people, usually me and Slava have access to. -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel -- Thanks, Volodymyr ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Paul Sokolovsky's maintainership application, was: Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Hello, On Sat, 30 May 2015 13:57:32 +0200 Yury V. Zaytsev y...@shurup.com wrote: On Sat, 2015-05-30 at 14:08 +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: But I was asked would I take maintainership myself, and I provided the answer. Sorry, I missed the answer in your numerous emails. Please see numbered list at the bottom of https://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc-devel/2015-May/msg00069.html , tehn number list at https://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc-devel/2015-May/msg00073.html . My understanding was that there was no answer, that is you don't want to make any clear commitments yourself, but rather prefer to consult other people as to how they should proceed, is that right? No, not right. If not, it would be helpful to know how much time and how regularly you are ready to commit, and what exactly you are going to be working on. As a maintainer, I would consider the most important job is to provide timely response to submissions, and lead submitters into preparing patches in a way suitable for merging. I don't have immediate plans to commit something myself (except for my own patches, once they're reviewed). But if I see that there're many issues reported for some non-core subsystem, or repeated attempts to fix it fail, I way raise the question of removal of that subsystem, and if initial discussion warrants, will prepare patches for that. All my idea of maintainership is based on the fact that I already use github daily, and already maintain many projects. github specifically improved my productivity a lot, while on previous-generation hosting sites I less than a dozen of projects, on github I have 100+ (I don't work on all of them at the same time, usually in round-robin fashion on 3-5 at the same time, plus regularly submit bugs/discuss issues with other projects). On top of that, I don't have free time last 3 years, having even less time last 1.5 years, and with all that I participate/maintain dozens of projects, and come up with new regularly. So, having one more project to look after doesn't add or take much from my situation (with maintenance efforts as described above). Feel free to look at my activity stats on github for perspective: https://github.com/pfalcon I can't give any firm numbers on how much I could spend on mc specifically. But if you want to hear something still, let it me 15min a day, than an extra hour on weekend, 2 hrs per week. If yes, then I'll rather not answer the rest of the mails, because it's going to cost me many hours. Yes, I also consider this proposal to be final, and ready to wait agreed-upon time (max 1 month, my suggestion is 2 weeks) to see if it's useful. I will be only glad if better (like, truly better, which care about community, not some code features) candidates will be found. I will be unhappy if better candidates won't be found and my proposal won't be found useful, but then I tried to be useful for a project which is important to me, and otherwise I don't have lack of projects to maintain. I'll try to post my own plan separately as time permits. Thanks, looking forward to it. Per above, I'd appreciate if there was timeframe set for applicants, so that they knew that if that time passed, and they were not selected, they are free to make other commitments elsewhere. -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev -- Best regards, Paul mailto:pmis...@gmail.com ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Sat, 2015-05-30 at 15:22 +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: Everything will be done on best effort basis, just the same as was done before, and as always the case with OpenSource projects. That's nonsense; most successful open source projects have drivers who are either employed to invest time into it, or have other circumstances that allow them to invest 10 hours per week as a bare minimum and above. This is where the community shines: if you have several drivers who are able to process contributions in a timely manner, it adds a lot of value, innovation, diversity, etc. Acceptance is the first step. If that is achieved, we can discuss technical and organizational/personal commitments aspects. I don't buy this; the first step is getting some real work done. Then we can discuss the acceptance. Example: Moofie is convincing, because he's done some excellent work and then went public with it. He didn't start by showing up and saying: hey, this is my plan, you have to accept it first, and then we can see if I'm actually going to do anything. He's already proven everything to me. You are not convincing at all, because all you have done so far is to waste a lot of time with your delusional posts (also in the thread started by Moofie!), and it seems that I'm not the only one who isn't very much impressed. -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Hello, On Sat, 30 May 2015 14:59:04 +0200 Yury V. Zaytsev y...@shurup.com wrote: On Sat, 2015-05-30 at 15:22 +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: Everything will be done on best effort basis, just the same as was done before, and as always the case with OpenSource projects. That's nonsense; most successful open source projects have drivers who are either employed to invest time into it, or have other circumstances that allow them to invest 10 hours per week as a bare minimum and above. We're talking majority open-source projects here, and mc is for a very long time is far from being successful (but indeed, for a project like mc it's enough to be just existing and maintained). This is where the community shines: if you have several drivers who are able to process contributions in a timely manner, it adds a lot of value, innovation, diversity, etc. Acceptance is the first step. If that is achieved, we can discuss technical and organizational/personal commitments aspects. I don't buy this; the first step is getting some real work done. Then we can discuss the acceptance. Example: Moofie is convincing, because he's done some excellent work and then went public with it. You think that adding more bloat is excellent, I think that it's bad, actually, the only way I can agree to adding more features is *replacing* older bloat, not adding more. He didn't start by showing up and saying: hey, this is my plan, you have to accept it first, and then we can see if I'm actually going to do anything. I'm doing stuff - see my github account. I can do (more) for mc too, given opportunity. But whatever I do, I do step by step, and so far my patch is stuck in the queue without proper review, so I'm not going forward until this problem is solved - replying to people, reviewing their stuff, working with them to make it better to lead into mainline. And that's exactly what I'm ready to start with. And if that's too little - well guys, it's exactly the area where you had problems and clearly need help/improvement. He's already proven everything to me. Good, take him to your team. Please pay attention to everyone's issues anyway. You are not convincing at all, because all you have done so far is to waste a lot of time with your delusional posts (also in the thread started by Moofie!), and it seems that I'm not the only one who isn't very much impressed. Ok, I consider my application rejected, and I'm generally not surprised (I indeed objectively didn't do too much for mc - but again, that's the problem which I'd like to be resolved - for everyone, not just for me - mc should be welcoming of contributions, and help people to help it). -- Best regards, Paul mailto:pmis...@gmail.com ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 8:47 AM, Yury V. Zaytsev y...@shurup.com wrote: On Sat, 2015-05-30 at 08:23 -0400, Volodymyr Buell wrote: That's the reason to decommission existing infrastructure asap - you pay for the things that work against your productivity. I've heard this before, and you still haven't explained how it works against *my* productivity, or the productivity of Andrew. I was referring to productivity of the team as a whole. And if you want to hear an explanation, here is this: * the process of code reviewing is non transparent enough for the community - attaching the patches to the tickets and reviewing these patches is not the same as pull requests * people tend to use the tools if they are good. If there are few options - hack the project on github and hack another project on trac - I'd say majority will choose the github I personally couldn't do much else in 1 hour per week that I'm spending on it anyways. Andrew likes it and it does make him productive: check the git log if you need statistics. Do you think that if the tracker is migrated to Github, I will magically be able to review 500 tickets in this 1 hour per week or what? You did get me wrong. I'm not saying about your personal productivity. Sorry for miscommunication. There are lot of people saying that dvc is bad because they used to share their work by sending *.patch files and they don't need anything else. Does that mean that it works well for other team members? I'd say no. What I meant is that it's much easier to work with PRs instead of patch files. It's easier for community to help to review these requests. It's easy to newcomers to get to it... A valid reason for moving in my opinion would be to reduce reliance on privately owned stuff, and I have been slowly working in this direction, and hope to take it further in the future, but other than that, I see no other reasons currently to do so. On Sat, 2015-05-30 at 08:23 -0400, Volodymyr Buell wrote: I see that you not so interested in migration as you didn't answer my question in private. It's not just a matter of interest; realistically, I can scrap up to 5 hours per week for mc, which means process the mailing list ~2 times per week; processing huge emails full of very questionable content by some posters takes hours, so there we are. I saw your mails among others, and I'll try to reply tomorrow. Now in what concerns the interest, yes, it is low. For once I wholeheartedly agree with Oswald. There need to be some very important advantage in the migration, and if we go for it, it should be done properly. One advantage could be that person X steps up and shows enough commitment to prepare a migration like Slava did, and which was later completed by Oswald. He also declares it as a pre-requisite for him taking over and investing serious time in the project. Under these circumstances, I can stick my own (very negative) opinion of Github issue tracker somewhere deep down, and accept that the tools are chosen by those people who do the real work. If they like Github issues and they make them productive, so be it. But I don't buy unsubstantiated arguments about magical community of productive and qualified members appearing out of nowhere, and doing quality code review over large spans of time. Instead, what will happen is that Github issue tracker will become just as dead swamp of issues and patches, as Trac has become now. I've been part of too many projects, and I know how successful open source projects work: there is a lot happening behind the scenes. -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev -- Thanks, Volodymyr ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 02:47:02PM +0200, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote: Under these circumstances, I can stick my own (very negative) opinion of Github issue tracker somewhere deep down, and accept that the tools are chosen by those people who do the real work. If they like Github issues and they make them productive, so be it. i'll use that as a launchpad for some general musings of state-of-the-art hosting tools i'm aware of. this is an invitation to discussion, and i find it interesting beyond the scope of mc. it's obvious at first sight that the github issue tracker provides much less formal structure than trac. and trac ain't that great to start with (especially on the workflow side, at least as configured for mc (i don't know what would be possible with a current version)). in github, almost everything is done with labels. it's nice and uncomplicated, but simply doesn't scale. on the migration side, it seems that it's impossible to fake issue reporters. incidentally, that's one of the two problems that i fixed last year in mc's issue import to trac because i found it so annoying. most advanced import tool i found: https://github.com/trustmaster/trac2github i find github's code review system terrible; it doesn't encourage the workflow i want (every commit being polished), and it doesn't scale, either. luckily, there is gerrithub.io to alleviate the problem. there is also an open-source clone of github: gitlab. it is really a look-alike, so it has pretty much all downsides of github, with the addition that no gerrit integration exists (yet). on the upside, the issue import is probably better. tool: https://gitlab.com/kevinlee/trac-issues-to-gitlab there is also bitbucket, but the free version is limited to teams of five, whatever that may mean in practice. anyone here has experience with it? yet another fully integrated solution (for own hosting) would be phabricator. no personal experience with it, either. ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 12:46:08AM +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: And, btw, can current github committers be enumerated please? I based a maintainer list in the original mail based on Midnight Commander org on github: https://github.com/MidnightCommander . It doesn't include you, Yury, so I didn't addressed to you, sorry. I assume you have commit access. I also see that https://github.com/ciampix commits and merges pull requests from time to time, and I see few posts of him in my local mailing lists archive (since 2013-09). What's his role, and how we can get him into the current discussion? (And how to set up the process that maintainers communicate on the mailing list, which is easily accessible to general public, while is least-effort option (respond when you have time, not right away like jabber, irc, etc.)) Here I am. Sorry for being lurking but I was interested in seeing how the situation was evolving before telling something myself. At this point my presentation is really due. I have to be honest: I (currently) am _NOT_ a developer. I am a translator. I currently maintain the GIMP and the GIMP manual into Italian. See: http://docs.gimp.org/2.8/it/ I am promoting the migration of KiCad docs from ODT to asciidoc with an i18n infrastructure. See: https://github.com/ciampix/kicad-doc I managed to keep the Italian mc translation in sync from 1998 or so until now (yes, a long period). My commit rights were granted by the mc maintainer of that time (Miguel de Icaza) and I maintained those privileges committing almost exclusively translations (manual, man, program) because translation is _not_ a one time effort but a good translation need constant revision. Lately I was tempted to commit patches that was waiting for revision/attention and I apologize if I have done something wrong. Anyway I do have (not much) spare time. I have a basic knowledge of C/git and I am willing to help. I have a project in mind on how to improve the i18n of mc docs (man pages manuals) but it is just in my mind and I am not ready to present it right now. To summarize: I will continue to maintain the mc Italian translation, I want to be more involved in the i18n matters and I want to do even more. I think that this situation is not critical but just a phase, a transition to a better development model and I want to be part of this change. I know that I have much to learn but I deeply believe it the learning by doing method. (Programmer's GOD, thanks for git revert! ;-) I think that to survive this impasse we do not really need full time experts. They do not hurt, of course, but they are not necessary. Free/Open projects are always scarce on resources but that fact never stopped the development. We need to be: - open: to new people/contribution - organized: we need to develop a method/tools to check the quality of contributions. This method should not be carved in stone: we have to be flexible enough to be able to fix it on the road. That will improve either the project and the programmers quality/skill. - modern: lets use tools that can lift the burden to manage such a project - joyful: contribution should be easy enough to keep the willingness of the volunteers - trusty: we need to have the trust of contributors and we must expect trustful people I hope to be part of this team. Regards, -- Marco Ciampa I know a joke about UDP, but you might not get it. ++ | GNU/Linux User #78271 | | FSFE fellow #364 | ++ ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Another thing that occurred to me: to save on long term development costs, we should simplify the codebase and get rid of alternatives. Slang and ncurses - keep one, drop the other Glib regex and pcre - same Charset: there are 5 possibilities handled by branches throughout the code (built with/without codeset support; if with: data is utf8 or 8bit, display is utf8 or 8bit) - let the most generic code branch handle all cases. Plugins: IIRC some folks already asked for multiple possible languages to write plugins in - hell, no, choose one and stick to that. Etc... Let's not put things on meta level unless there's a good reason. Let's maintain 1 filemanager, not many at once. e. Sent from mobile ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Hi guys, I'm sorry to hear about this... but honestly it didn't surprise me. I think anyone could have seen that this was going to happen, it was only a matter of time - few months, a year or two maybe. What I'm really sad about is that the issue has been raised a couple of times already, yet (former) maintainers didn't take the time and effort to involve new people in the project. I would probably be a smoother transition now if they did. I disagree that a 20hrs/week commitment is required from someone. I don't think it's the right model, and we're unlikely to find anyone. There were times (about a year ago) when I had tons of time to contribute, yet mainstream dev's resources were the bottleneck in reviewing these changes. At other times they were active but I didn't have time to contribute. Instead, I believe it should be a core with 3-5 people who have similar working style and similar vision of the project, and each contribute just a few hours per week. There'd be code review for every nontrivial change, but it could be done by anyone from this team who happens to have some free time. IMO that's the way to avoid bottlenecks, yet guarantee a certain level of code quality. 1-2 people at the core will always be bottleneck, and allowing write access to pretty much anyone who has already contributed something could easily lead to the whole project falling apart due to no clear goals, no clear coding and quality standards, every random hacker with hardly any coding experience pushing for their unmaintainable dirty solution to be committed. And, that being said, while I'm open bringing in brand new folks (e.g. Luca), I'm quite conservative here and would prefer to see him joining conversations at some tickets and posting several great patches (that is, gaining trust in those who already have some) before giving him write access. I'd be happy to see Mooffie on the team right away, his work (along with his style and the contents of the homepage) totally convinced me. I'm sorry to say this, but I myself cannot guarantee anything and cannot make any commitments. I'm spending a long vacation right now where I was planning to do some coding on my primary hobby project (gnome-terminal), and maybe address one or two issues on my secondary hobby project (mc); all subject to my mood. After this vacation I'll start a new job which will require 100% of me. So I'd rather stay an occasional contributor as I am now, and not devote myself to anything with mc. G-t is my personal hobby project in the sense that I do hunt down and address bugs that cause problems to other people but I myself don't particularly care about. Mc never reached this level for me, I never took time to look at bugs and patches that I myself wasn't personally interested in. Don't ask me why it turned out this way, I don't know - maybe it was because on g-t I got quick feedback of my work, whereas on mc I often had to wait for so long that I almost lost interest, and often missed the free time I had when I could have worked on these issues. As for the current segfault issue, I think the broken change should be reverted for now and a .15 released until we come up with a proper solution. Generally it would be good to make releases closer to each other, let's say every 2 months or so, and much sooner when some critical bug sneaks in. This is because I think most users will use mc as shipped by their distros, and distros pick the newest tarball at a random time, hardly ever caring about backporting a fix from git, let alone from trac discussions and vagrant patches. Anyway... I really don't have any wise words on how it should work out from here. Let's hope we manage to come up with something great. Giant thanks to you guys who maintained this project for years, I'm sad to see you go, and wish you all the best! e. ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Hello, There was a post on a popular Russian-speaking IT site geektimes.ru authored from an account with an associated full name Ilia Maslakov titled (translated) ms is over!?: http://geektimes.ru/post/250964/ Link to author's account is at the bottom of the article: http://geektimes.ru/users/smind/ , it has 6th position in user's ratings on site, so likely belongs to the person named. The summarized translation is: Lately, a leading developer wrote in developer's conference: andrew_b: I closed bunch of tickets, but that's likely it. All comes to its end. It weren't worst 5 years in my life. mc is currently as briefcase without a handle: pity to drop, pity to carry. I'm tired of all that, I quit. So, mc development history led by our team comes to a milestone. Myself, I haven't done a commit to master in over a year. The post is written in a clear FUD manner, and implies too many far-fetched things, like: that departure of a maintainer means death of the project, that not this list titled mc-devel is where important discussion and announcements happen, but on delevoper's conference where people speak Russian, etc. The current maintainers, namely Andrew Borodin, Slava Zanko, Ilia Maslakov, Sergei Trofimovich - please provide full disclosure of what happens within your team. Whatever it is, please show goodwill by adding Egmont Koblinger to the maintainer team, if he agrees (including discussions and commit access), to show that the project wasn't usurped by Soviet Obkom. Thanks, Paul mailto:pmis...@gmail.com ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 27.05.2015 13:37, Paul Sokolovsky пишет: Hi all, The current maintainers, namely Andrew Borodin, Slava Zanko, Ilia Maslakov, Sergei Trofimovich - please provide full disclosure of what happens within your team. Whatever it is, please show goodwill by adding Egmont Koblinger to the maintainer team, if he agrees (including discussions and commit access), to show that the project wasn't usurped by Soviet Obkom. Yes, I confirm that our team as fact has ended to develop mc. Ilia has issues with access to internet from his work, at home he has much stronger priorities with family, the same for Andrew. As for me, I have heavy loading on work, after work I very busy on building my house. So there is no time for development mc. And of course, we are opened for any of our wishes to develop mc. Just let me know if someone wants to participate in development and I'll give write access to repo/wiki/transifex and I'll do some knowledge transfer about usual workflows (such as: preparing for release, code styling, where our ContinuousIntegration is placed and so on). I hope, mc will rise again with new blood. And I agree with Andrew: It weren't worst 5 years in my life Yeah, it was five happy years for me :) WBR, Slavaz -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1 iEYEARECAAYFAlVlotoACgkQb3oGR6aVLpqysACfROPBo1/KrzNu73zwm8kpLTEI QbsAn2Gwet6bDc0FZc4nx4Gphsl4LSTE =QFDk -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Hi - Although I just signed on to the team to try to work with documentation, mc is one of the most important tools in my box. Therefore, despite the fact that I have very little coding experience on a project like this, I am certainly willing to learn anything necessary to keep mc alive. I want to thank all of you who have worked on mc in the past and let you know that it is an incredibly valuable tool for me and I think for many other people as well. I hope that those of you who are moving on will always know that your contributions are appreciated. We all wish you well and thank you for your work. Thank you! On 05/27/2015 06:56 AM, Slava Zanko wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 27.05.2015 13:37, Paul Sokolovsky пишет: Hi all, The current maintainers, namely Andrew Borodin, Slava Zanko, Ilia Maslakov, Sergei Trofimovich - please provide full disclosure of what happens within your team. Whatever it is, please show goodwill by adding Egmont Koblinger to the maintainer team, if he agrees (including discussions and commit access), to show that the project wasn't usurped by Soviet Obkom. Yes, I confirm that our team as fact has ended to develop mc. Ilia has issues with access to internet from his work, at home he has much stronger priorities with family, the same for Andrew. As for me, I have heavy loading on work, after work I very busy on building my house. So there is no time for development mc. And of course, we are opened for any of our wishes to develop mc. Just let me know if someone wants to participate in development and I'll give write access to repo/wiki/transifex and I'll do some knowledge transfer about usual workflows (such as: preparing for release, code styling, where our ContinuousIntegration is placed and so on). I hope, mc will rise again with new blood. And I agree with Andrew: It weren't worst 5 years in my life Yeah, it was five happy years for me :) WBR, Slavaz -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1 iEYEARECAAYFAlVlotoACgkQb3oGR6aVLpqysACfROPBo1/KrzNu73zwm8kpLTEI QbsAn2Gwet6bDc0FZc4nx4Gphsl4LSTE =QFDk -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel -- * David P. Both, RHCE Millennium Technology Consulting LLC Raleigh, NC, USA 919-389-8678 db...@millennium-technology.com www.millennium-technology.com www.databook.bz - Home of the DataBook for Linux DataBook is a Registered Trademark of David Both * This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately. ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Please organise a pol to choose a right person. Personally my opinion - why not to give a steering wheel to Mooffie - the author of mc^2 fork? It seems like he did much more for mc than anybody else in past few years. I suggest his candidature. On May 27, 2015 8:19 AM, Slava Zanko slavaza...@gmail.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hi Luca, 27.05.2015 14:43, Luca Lazzarini wrote: Hi all! I am Luca, it is the first time that I write here. Honestly I cannot let mc die, so I would be happy to offer myself as volunteer to help the development. I am a web developer, for the most frontend but my background is C (from the university, I was pretty good, lets say almost medium weight). I am working as software developer in Amsterdam and I am building the frontend for a startup in London (from a friend) so I will be pretty busy for the next two months. Anyway after that time I should have sorted out the front end for the startup and I should have free time back! Ok, let me know when you'll have free time and I'll give you all needed permissions. Thanks! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1 iEYEARECAAYFAlVltkUACgkQb3oGR6aVLpqHTQCdHSaWTLFWRvCzsOwRNo42CBR6 +EYAnRat+vjHfUOhvxI0v/MngMrR8xzk =F6Nj -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On 5/27/15, Paul Sokolovsky pmis...@gmail.com wrote: happens within your team. Whatever it is, please show goodwill by adding Egmont Koblinger to the maintainer team, if he agrees I second that! ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hi Luca, 27.05.2015 14:43, Luca Lazzarini wrote: Hi all! I am Luca, it is the first time that I write here. Honestly I cannot let mc die, so I would be happy to offer myself as volunteer to help the development. I am a web developer, for the most frontend but my background is C (from the university, I was pretty good, lets say almost medium weight). I am working as software developer in Amsterdam and I am building the frontend for a startup in London (from a friend) so I will be pretty busy for the next two months. Anyway after that time I should have sorted out the front end for the startup and I should have free time back! Ok, let me know when you'll have free time and I'll give you all needed permissions. Thanks! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1 iEYEARECAAYFAlVltkUACgkQb3oGR6aVLpqHTQCdHSaWTLFWRvCzsOwRNo42CBR6 +EYAnRat+vjHfUOhvxI0v/MngMrR8xzk =F6Nj -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On 5/27/15, Volodymyr Buell vbu...@gmail.com wrote: Please organise a pol to choose a right person. Personally my opinion - why not to give a steering wheel to Mooffie Hey, hold the horses. I'm not at all a programming hotshot, and being practically anonymous here so far, I should be treated with suspicion. To borrow the [in]famous idiom, I haven't proven myself to be real man ;-) And nobody has actually looked into my code yet. There are better people here who have shown aptitude, responsibility and dedication for years (Egmont comes to mind). It seems [that Mooffie] did much more for mc than anybody else in past few years. No, that's patently untrue. First, it's just an illusion that writing mc^2 involved a lot of work. Second, Andrew Borodin has been doing a tremendous (and fantastic) work of cleaning up the code. People perhaps aren't aware of this. It won't be right to say that MC stagnates. As an aside: As one for whom MC is the center of the universe, I was surprised to learn that this is not the case for everybody, and that MC's lifeblood was not flowing as strong as one would imagine. Until a year or two ago I was convinced MC's development was financed and steered by the Illuminati... I'd guess, based on my own experience, that people (that is, programmers) are simply not aware of MC's predicament. After all, how would they? There's no sign for that unless one stumbles upon specific posts here. ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Everything you said is right. But what current mc lacks are new features. Developers can be very good at code refactoring or cleaning-up or rewriting the editor to support charset detection... but in reality what people want is the tool that do what THEY want - and yes, plugins ARE the solution. Just give people a chance and github would bursting with mc extensions... So that's why I suggested you - in my opinion you are trying to change a course to the right direction. Another thing is the fact that the team is going to pass the project to guy why, i believe, is more anonymous to the project than you. I have nothing against Luca, do not misunderstand me, but still prefer the poll. On May 27, 2015 11:42 AM, Mooffie moof...@gmail.com wrote: On 5/27/15, Volodymyr Buell vbu...@gmail.com wrote: Please organise a pol to choose a right person. Personally my opinion - why not to give a steering wheel to Mooffie Hey, hold the horses. I'm not at all a programming hotshot, and being practically anonymous here so far, I should be treated with suspicion. To borrow the [in]famous idiom, I haven't proven myself to be real man ;-) And nobody has actually looked into my code yet. There are better people here who have shown aptitude, responsibility and dedication for years (Egmont comes to mind). It seems [that Mooffie] did much more for mc than anybody else in past few years. No, that's patently untrue. First, it's just an illusion that writing mc^2 involved a lot of work. Second, Andrew Borodin has been doing a tremendous (and fantastic) work of cleaning up the code. People perhaps aren't aware of this. It won't be right to say that MC stagnates. As an aside: As one for whom MC is the center of the universe, I was surprised to learn that this is not the case for everybody, and that MC's lifeblood was not flowing as strong as one would imagine. Until a year or two ago I was convinced MC's development was financed and steered by the Illuminati... I'd guess, based on my own experience, that people (that is, programmers) are simply not aware of MC's predicament. After all, how would they? There's no sign for that unless one stumbles upon specific posts here. ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
Hello, On Wed, 27 May 2015 21:04:33 +0200 Yury V. Zaytsev y...@shurup.com wrote: [] If you have been following the development, it would have been known to you that, as a matter of fact, all relevant discussions to the development of mc in the last 4-5 years were happening in Russian speaking Jabber conference at mc-...@conference.jabber.ru . [] to show that the project wasn't usurped by Soviet Obkom. -25 points to adequacy So, there's a bug tracker which doesn't get responses or even triaging, actually for months it's not even possible to submit a ticket at all. There's development mailing list, where it's barely possible to get a response from maintainers either. And yet there's Russian speaking Jabber conference. Keep counting points on adequacy of such maintainership, Yury. Keep suggesting people maintaining their own forks, for years, like you did. One of the problems mc projects has is all this infrastructure. It's stuck on the project model of 90ies. Gosh, it's hard, bloated, time-consuming, inefficient, leading to frustration. But you clutch to it and don't want to try the easy way, until people who support all that Sisyphus work ran out of resources. The last active committer was Andrew, but (unexpectedly to me) he decided to resign as well. Other people gave early warnings that not everything is right with project maintainership, so one can only guess why it's unexpected to you. I have personally publicly asked Egmont to take over the maintaintership multiple times, however, he is understandably reluctant to do so, and no one can force him to do it, if he doesn't want to. It's his decision. Perhaps it should be done step by step, while simplifying infrastructure. Initial steps are very easy: 1. Switch development process to github. Nothing needs to be done, except declaration - everything is already there. People should be just encouraged to submit bugs to github bugtracker, patches - as github pull requests. 2. People with mc experience should be given commit access to github repo. Basic criteria should be patches already accepted from a developer and presence of maintainership program (to be posted on the list). 3. Encourage all interested people to triage new bugreports and review patches. 4. Provide timely response to tickets/patches - point 3 should help with that, but that's the main work of maintainers - communicate with the community (not in the closed circle). 5. Then the hard part is left - quality standards for a release, and making a release. But this should come as natural step after all the above, so hopefully won't be frightening to new maintainers any longer. (But this step will require active involvement of old team, unlike the steps above which are automagic). -- Best regards, Paul mailto:pmis...@gmail.com ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Wed, 2015-05-27 at 13:37 +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote: There was a post on a popular Russian-speaking IT site geektimes.ru authored from an account with an associated full name Ilia Maslakov titled (translated) ms is over!?: http://geektimes.ru/post/250964/ I can confirm that this is indeed a post by Ilia, one of the current maintainers of Midnight Commander, speaking on his own behalf and without talking to anyone first. The situation was as follows: I checked into the Russian-speaking Jabber conference where the maintainers usually hang out to see if I can merge in some trivial patches directly into master. There, my conversation with Andrew happened, or rather he simply stated the quoted phrase and left. This was witnessed by Ilia, and he decided to make it public in the way that you have described. The post is written in a clear FUD manner, and implies too many far-fetched things, like: that departure of a maintainer means death of the project I think that it's rather your reading of this post which has lead you to make those far-fetched implications. that not this list titled mc-devel is where important discussion and announcements happen, but on delevoper's conference where people speak Russian, etc. If you have been following the development, it would have been known to you that, as a matter of fact, all relevant discussions to the development of mc in the last 4-5 years were happening in Russian speaking Jabber conference at mc-...@conference.jabber.ru . Note, that I'm not saying that I personally think that's the way it should be, but for better or worse it used to be this way. The current maintainers, namely Andrew Borodin, Slava Zanko, Ilia Maslakov, Sergei Trofimovich - please provide full disclosure of what happens within your team. As Slava has said, most current team members ended up having personal commitments that do not leave them enough time to maintain the project, and this has been obvious to anyone following the development for quite some time. The last active committer was Andrew, but (unexpectedly to me) he decided to resign as well. In what concerns me personally, I haven't been committing much at all in the recent years, but I have been taking care of the infrastructure, and I'm ready to continue doing so. I don't know if I'll manage to make enough time to start committing again, but most likely not in the near future, unless I will be able to negotiate sponsoring the development time with my current employer. In any case, we would certainly welcome anyone willing to take over the maintainership. However, sadly, no one has applied so far, and the call that I was about to issue by the end of this week was preempted by Ilia. Oh well, let's consider this as the official call for volunteers. I'll be reading the rest of today's traffic shortly. Whatever it is, please show goodwill by adding Egmont Koblinger to the maintainer team, if he agrees (including discussions and commit access), I have personally publicly asked Egmont to take over the maintaintership multiple times, however, he is understandably reluctant to do so, and no one can force him to do it, if he doesn't want to. It's his decision. to show that the project wasn't usurped by Soviet Obkom. -25 points to adequacy -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Wed, 2015-05-27 at 18:42 +0300, Mooffie wrote: Second, Andrew Borodin has been doing a tremendous (and fantastic) work of cleaning up the code. People perhaps aren't aware of this. It won't be right to say that MC stagnates. Andrew was one of the best maintainers that I have seen so far, his work is deeply appreciated and he will be dearly missed. Until a year or two ago I was convinced MC's development was financed and steered by the Illuminati... This was actually quite close to the truth at some point, but sadly the circumstances have changed now, as Slava has explained. I'd guess, based on my own experience, that people (that is, programmers) are simply not aware of MC's predicament. After all, how would they? There's no sign for that unless one stumbles upon specific posts here. I don't think it's so easy; I have personally witnessed mc has dying at least twice, and the problem is simply that it's extremely hard to find someone how would commit at least 20 hours per week to a project for years without getting paid for it, because people need to sustain themselves in some way, and even part-time volunteering is no walk in the park. Of course, mc still has a large following of users that test the code and report bugs, and some of them even go as far as to suggest patches. However, most of these patches cannot be applied verbatim, but have to be fixed, and, at very least, reviewed. Still, many are unsurprisingly of a very high opinion of their own code, and would be happy to commit it directly to master, if they only get a chance. The amount of effort that it takes to review the patch, and fix it if it's of unacceptable quality is simply not appreciated, but, unfortunately, this doesn't happen by magic, but rather through huge recurring investments of time. The problem really is to find someone who is not only going to commit a few patches and be gone with the wind, but rather a person who will review the patches even in the case that he/she doesn't have personal interest in it. Someone who will carefully review contributions, fix them where appropriate and get them merged, like Andrew did. Someone who will triage bugs in the Trac, check if they can be reproduced, and fix them even if he/she doesn't suffer from them personally. Preferably, someone who is not deeply deranged and is capable of basic communication with humans. Someone who is ready to commit at least 20 hours per week to this cause on a regular basis (read years). Anyone? -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Wed, 2015-05-27 at 12:30 -0400, Volodymyr Buell wrote: Just give people a chance and github would bursting with mc extensions... Let me give you an example: One contributor came up with an idea to fix a bug add a new feature; the patch was applied without much ado. A severe regression was later identified and fixed. Even later, it turned out, that the patch very badly broke (as in, segfault) a core feature as a side effect. The original author didn't take the responsibility for it, and there is no manpower to fix it, because a proper fix requires a very substantial engineering of how things work. Now we are left in a situation where a basic feature has become unusable in a new release, and won't be fixed anytime soon. This is a real story, which unfolded over the last couple of months. So yes, this kind of bursting with extensions is a very plausible scenario. In fact, this is exactly what is going to happen if a random person is going to take over control. -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
Re: mc is over!? - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site
On Wed, 2015-05-27 at 14:35 +0200, Luca Lazzarini wrote: The sooner I get the access to the repository, the sooner I can start to check the code. Hi Luca, You already have (read) access to the repository: https://github.com/MidnightCommander/mc The issue tracking system is (currently) at the following URL: http://www.midnight-commander.org/ I have briefly described what maintainership is all about in a neighboring email in this thread... -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev ___ mc-devel mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel