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Re: Is the eCos Open Source development model at risk?


Michael Checky wrote:

When you post your contributions to the mailing list, after a few months
they are effectively lost to the rest of the community, since it takes a
reasonable amount of effort search the mailing list to find if any
particular patch is just what the user wants. The eCos community has lost
the benefits of your contribution.

I can assure you that none of the patches have been lost in reality though.


I also disagree with the notion that to get better responsiveness, we
should enter into a service contract with the eCos maintainers.  In the
Open Source model, the respository is community property and it's up to the
community to maintain it and improve it.  Currently the select group of
people who have write access to the CVS tree act like a QA team for the
rest of us.  If they don't have the time to be responsive, we as a
community have to help them out or the community has to development a
different gatekeeper mechanism to improve responsiveness.

The only thing I can suggest at this time, is how do other successful Open
Source projects handle this problem?

The busier ones have a lot more of the "helping out" :-). Those who show themselves to be good reviewers then get check-in access too in other projects. I don't see why that wouldn't be the case for eCos too.


Do bear in mind that compared to many other projects, some of the patches received are very large indeed - a new architecture+variant+platform port can comprise thousands of lines of code. One of those can take several hours to go through. Some require very careful thought - unfortunately we can't just trust people for critical code (unless we have no choice e.g. no hardware and they do claim to have tested it well).

Jifl
--
eCosCentric    http://www.eCosCentric.com/    The eCos and RedBoot experts
--[ "You can complain because roses have thorns, or you ]--
--[  can rejoice because thorns have roses." -Lincoln   ]-- Opinions==mine


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