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

[Dan Leslie]

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1) Yes, touching base verbally is often incredibly productive and 
decisive.
2) As a method of getting a feel for the state of the entire project 
posting occasional status updates to the list would be greatly 
appreciated, from myself and my fellow students especially.
3) We were going to set up a trac system for our team's use. I'm unsure 
as to how a global bug tracking system for a multitude of projects is 
distinct from each project hosting their own, aside from making 
available a central location for new developers to jump in.
4) Something popular and with wide software support. CVS, SVN, Bazaar, 
Darcs come to mind, having quite substantial communities behind each. 
This is a whole discussion in and of itself, however, and I'm hesitant 
to blindly push forward.

Thanks,
- -Dan

On 31-May-06, at 11:16 AM, Jim Gettys wrote:

> 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
>
>
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>
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