[OLPC-devel] OLPC development project organization. Status calls? Other techniques?

[Jim Gettys]

With the increasing activity on the OLPC hardware and software, it is
getting difficult to track what is going on, what is getting done, who
is working on what, and, more importantly, what isn't getting done; and
our community of developers will be growing again greatly very soon as
more hardware reaches people over the next several weeks.

Chris and I have started to put a schedule together to help keep track
of things; I'll put it up when it is a bit better together, maybe by the
end of today.

Here are questions for comments on the list:

1) would a weekly/biweekly phone call help with coordination and
communications?  If weekly, we might alternate times to favor far east
vs. US and Europe on alternate weeks.

2) would people prefer to post status to the list? in addition to a
phone call?  instead of a phone call?

3) we could put tasks needing doing into a tracking system (e.g.
bugzilla) and track tasks that way?  Or are there better tools for this
purpose we should install and use?

4) What should our preferred SCM be?  

Git is clearly going to be used for kernel work, and possibly for X
Window System work (some sub-projects have converted over to using it in
the X community)..  

Ivan Krstic highly prefers mercurial for most uses, and is able to give
some cogent arguments he can elaborate on. I detest CVS, and will veto
*starting* any projects using it... The RH folks have been using
mercurial for sugar, and are more or less happy.

I suggest we start new projects using a common SCM, rather than a random
assortment, and unless people object now, we'll use mercurial for our
new projects.  Obviously, existing projects we choose to host can do
what they want.

5) Ivan is recommending we not use gforge having talked to some people
who have been using it; this begs project hosting tools.  In my
experience, account management quickly becomes a scaling issue.  It is
important that project leaders be able to add members to projects
immediately without requiring central approval or manual account
creation. I know there are tools developed by a number of other
projects: e.g. handhelds.org has time tested and recently improved
tools. There may be others.  Time is of the essence if we want to go
this route. If you know of such tools, please let me know so we can make
a rational judgment of what to do in this area.

                        Comments,
                            - Jim Gettys



-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child