[syslinux] Open thougts about the project governance & workflow

Gene Cumm gene.cumm at gmail.com
Tue Sep 1 02:58:14 PDT 2015


On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 3:55 AM, Erwan Velu via Syslinux
<syslinux at zytor.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I've been involved in Syslinux since 14 years and been almost off for many
> years for multiple reasons. I'm currently trying to recover and while
> observing the project with a little of distance I noticed the following :
>
> - project's activity is pretty low
> - patches sent to the mailing list (ML) are not likely to be reviewed
> - Integration workflow is pretty unclear
> - release cycles are pretty long
>
> Please note that I'm not ranting against anyone. We are all working on our
> free time and do our best.
>
> We started a discussion about that topic on the irc channel but I'd prefer
> to push it to the ML to get feedbacks from others.
>
> From my perspective we are in this situation for the following reasons :
> - we are lacking of people on the project (dev & qa)
> - we are badly using people time
> - the feeback loop between dev, users & qa is pretty broken leading to
> frustation from everyone
>
> As a dev, here come the issue I have with the project
> - I don't know who is able to take care of my patches
> - I don't know when they will be reviewed & merged

I've been the sole one merging for the past few months.  I see a point
here that I should probably be pointing towards a commit ID or commit
mailing list message in the archive.  I should probably also
acknowledge receipt of a patch in addition to tagging the message as a
patch for review.

> As a user, I do think it's pretty hard to understand when a issue will be
> fixed & released.
>
> As dev have very few time to work on Syslinux, I'd like to see the workflow
> being more defined and more distributed to workaround the missing of peter.
> He's very loaded so we have to help him. We cannot push the whole
> responsability on him to take care of patches, merging, testing and release.

Some of this has been done but the biggest question remaining in my
mind is solely around releases.

> I really wonder if we could make our workflow being less 90's like. I mean
> sending patches to a ML and waiting for someone to take care of it and
> finally forgetting it.
>
> Ady made a serious job tracking them for a while and then decided to stop
> because it was too much energy for very few returns. Gene is also
> maintaining a tree on his side but what is integrated or not is pretty hard
> to track when working on the project from time to time.

I still maintain my personal repos on github and zytor and push to the
now-official repo.cz repo.

> I'm wondering if using a github-like service couldn't be useful for us. I
> mean having a place where we can see all the issues & pending pull-requests
> (PR). I'm using that services all day long and that's pretty efficient. If
> the PR associated to an issue is OK you can merge it instantly, if not just
> asking for a rework to the dev.
>
> I know we have already a bugzilla but I don't find the integration with git
> very "fluent".

Unless there's a missing piece that someone made that's out there, it's human.

> Anyway, I'm sending this email trying to get your thoughts about this and
> trying to redefine the workflow & role of the current people on the project
> (dev, qa, maintainer, ..).
>
> Sorry for such long email on the ML, please take it in the positive side of
> it, we have to rework the team & roles to avoid the project dying by people
> leaving.
>
> Erwan


-- 
-Gene


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