PLD cooperation

[Mariusz Mazur]

Ok, this is our side of the story.

First -- PLD is a 100% community project, we don't exist on paper and there is 
no legal governing body (we're not registered within a legal system of any 
country). There is an informal group called the Core Developers Group (CDG), 
but it's mostly about resolving conflicts and making hard decisions and not 
about representing PLD. So for any given opinion you might hear from any of 
our developers, do keep in mind that it's his/her private opinion and doesn't 
bind the whole project in any way.


I'll do a quick summary of the key aspects of our project and I'd count on one 
of you to do the same (even if it was to satisfy our (erm, I mean *my*) own 
curiosity :).

Like I've said, officially we don't exist, but that doesn't stop us from being 
around for a couple of years (since 1998 I think). Generally we started out 
as a Polish project, but since we've forces upon ourselves to have at least 
the most important things being done in English (commit logs and currently 
our web site), we've attracted two foreign developers (Glen from Estonia and 
Aredridel from Texas). Since we're rather lazy, most of the messages on our 
mailing lists are in Polish, but that's just proportional to the number of 
foreign developers.

You've mentioned a fork. Well, you've initially mailed the 'kloczek' guy but 
the fact of the matter is that we've kicked him out two years ago (he kicked  
himself out depending on how you look at it). He had controll of a large 
chunk of our infrastructure and used it to force his solutions upon others. 
We've decided enough was enough and switched to using other machines (and to 
the pld-linux.org domain; pld.org.pl remained his) and gave him an option to 
either work on our terms (and respect Core Developers Group's decisions) or 
walk away. He walked. The world is a lot brighter place ever since.

As for development -- I think the most important aspect is that we don't have 
maintainers. Every developer has the right to modify any spec file he wants 
to. The only people that have any additional rights are the ones responsible 
for maintaining our infrastructure (+ members of the CDG and so called 
Release Managers). We rely on package testing, and allmost real-time changes 
review (all commits are mailed to a mailing list which is subscribed by most 
of the developers) for entropy controll (+ people get shouted on if they 
break something for anyone). Of course there are 'groups of interest', but 
they are informal and it's a good idea to consult bigger changes, but it's 
not obligatory.

Some more details can be found in this text: http://distrodev.org/?q=node/6

We split various apps into a lot of subpackages which might irritate some 
people (there are some problems with having so many packages depend on each 
other, but we choose to cope with that in exchange for the flexibility it 
gives us).

We don't aim for any specific use and developers are free to make any changes 
they need. This way PLD can be seen as a very nice base for some more fine 
grained systems. A large chunk of the developer base work as admins at 
various universities/companies, so that's where most of our infrastructure 
lives (all across Poland and some neighboor countries).

It's late, can't think of anything else that might be of interest to you.

We'd be mostly interested in the same information I've given you since any 
type of merge would need to take into account both the organizational and 
infrastructure levels.


-- 
In the year eighty five ten
God is gonna shake his mighty head
He'll either say,
"I'm pleased where man has been"
Or tear it down, and start again