Fwd: Re: PLD cooperation

[Mariusz Mazur]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: PLD cooperation
Date: poniedziałek 10 października 2005 21:42
From: Michael Shigorin <mike w osdn.org.ua>
To: Mariusz Mazur <mmazur w kernel.pl>
Cc: lav w altlinux.org, ldv w altlinux.org, force w altlinux.org, 
pld-discuss-pl w pld-linux.org

On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 01:57:47AM +0200, Mariusz Mazur wrote:
> Ok, this is our side of the story.

Thanks; I happened to come upon some of the more relevant pages
a bit later that day.  Some of the questions went away just then.

> 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).

ALT Linux was born within ALT Linux Ltd, a company born in 2001
(the people were around for quite a longer time, a few years they
worked as "IPLabs Linux Team" and mostly participated in i18n and
l10n of different distros including SuSE and Mdk).

The proposal to collaborate in an open manner was published from
the very beginning, and it was quite so.  A few companies have
joined the project since, and quite a few developers too (seems
like we're numbered at 162, I think some 100 are active and some
30 or so are really active).

> 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.

It's quite natural.  As I've already said, I'm just a member of
ALT Linux Team and no official speaker, too.

> 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 [...] :).

Yeah, thanks for outlining them.  (couldn't resist the "...and
here are some lines along", will compose one more followup...
hopefully tomorrow, it was quite a runny weekend)

> Generally we started out as a Polish project

Polish(ed), eh? :) (singled out as a cute name then...)

> 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)

Would be interesting to know, too... but public resources are
quite another, even if quite connected, topic.

> 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.

We have community-en@ that was somewhat growing active some two
years ago (I believe this coincided with 2.3 release and positive
reviews at DistroWatch and DesktopLinux or a site like that, and
there was a specialized "european" build of the distro later...
oh well, right now the list is rather silent).

> You've mentioned a fork.

I've actually read your FAQ and a story in Polish that was the
repost of another guy's message with proposal to "calm things
down"... and a friend of mine told that one of his colleagues
on another major project complained to him back then that the
situation was holding him from joining PLD.

> 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).

Well I'd have mailed anyways, we humans do have the right to err.
Still we do have the right to accept that we err and fix that,
but that requires proper will.

> 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.

Hm, we do since some time ago (and a bit too much occasional
breakage introduced by accidental "new maintainers" who would
either upload a package without finding out that it already
existed, or fix something for them and introduce a major PITA
for the rest of the team (the less harmful would be e.g. careless
library updates breaking ABI, sometimes API, and when the
upstream was ign^H^Wsleepy enough not to change soname things
would get even more "funny").

This is enforced at incoming, and the "okay letter" to let
another people build some package is quite simple (I guess
there's no requirement of a valid GPG signature at the moment
even).

CVS/SVN/etc are used on personal level, there's no such thing
as a centalized VCS repo (gasp!  even if cvs.altlinux.org was
written in years ago).  Sorry if that sounds wild but it's just
so -- nobody actually got the time to do it.

Part of what might be mutually interesting seems what's not
implemented yet (TM) for both you and us...

> 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).

We (erm, some quite distinct people, notably ldv@ and at@) have
invested significant time into (after-)build-time checks and
repository-wide checks performed by linter scripts; recent
developments include the script to extract ELF symbols from
binaries to form a complete list of them in the repo.  It has
already helped in finding packages using bundled libraries like
zlib, zziplib and the like; should also help with detecting
non-workable apps before they actually crash on someone.

There are some more areas where paid labour (and in some times
particular tasks of a person doing particular job) would collide
with volunteers and this would disturb people -- but I think
we're working on it and ALT is slowly coming into a shape where
there _is_ a viable _community_ project, where firms are within
community, not above it.  Maybe it's me overly optimistic but
still.

BTW, Benjamin Mako Hill from Canonical Ltd has an article on that:
http://mako.cc/writing/funding_volunteers/funding_volunteers.html

Nice one I must say.

> 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.

We have "packager teams" which might have additional MLs or
aliases to contact them and to coordinate the work on particular
packages but in fact these are usually a single active maintainer
and a few of those who care but wouldn't do the job themselves
for all its length.

} Juz mi sie nie chcialo opisywac wszystkiego od a do z,
} na razie to co jest na distrodev powinno wystarczyc.
Same tak.

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

Hm, the builds are carried out in host system?  Dmitry Levin has
developed a standalone isolated build environment over here:
ftp://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/people/ldv/hasher/

(after one of the partner firms freed their build system which
was very nice in supporting particular workflow but also had some
assumptions, like "no-one is going to break out of chroot in
%post", so at least theoretically, the possibility for attacks
on a build system was there; now it's gone)

> 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).

Yeah, we're there too :)

> We don't aim for any specific use and developers are free to
> make any changes they need.

I'm afraid there's no "big nice policy" aka "vision" published
for ALT as well.  People rather do whatever they like and need,
and for the most part it even works.  Sometimes this lazy
approach does bring in its drawbacks, though.

> This way PLD can be seen as a very nice base for some more fine
> grained systems.

ALT is used for Samba appliances (ApplianceWare) and powers at
least one more "embedded" router distro (http://radlinux.org).
My "bare" system for vserver based on Master 2.4 is 16M tar.bz2
consisting of some 99 packages.

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

It's more than enough both to recap what was known to me, what
I've guessed or oversighted (like "free for all" commit style),
so at the moment (it's late here too, even if I've read your
reply earlier in the morning) it's just enough.

> 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.

I'll try to outline it in a second message, also refraining from
commenting the original (right now it was just too interesting to
compare some things this way :).

Thanks again.

PS: I've left the list Cc in:, maybe you sort this out better at
mailman (I read Polish a bit but subscribing that list with my
performance seems unpractical).

--
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike w altlinux.ru>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/

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