Sent to you by Damien via Google Reader: A New Community Development Model via The Squeak Oversight Board Blog by andreasraab on 7/1/09 In the board meeting today we had a nice discussion about how to move forward with a new community development model for Squeak. Here is an overview of the model and what will happen next: The goals The goal of this process is to get rid of as many hurdles as possible in the contribution process. We are trying to enable the community at large to improve Squeak, the core of the system and its supporting libraries. To do this, we are adopting processes that have been shown to work in commercial settings: The use of Monticello as the primary source code management system, free access for the developers to the main repositories, an incremental update process for both developers and users of Squeak. Repositories We will be setting up the following Monticello repositories: * http://source.squeak.org/trunk This will be the main repository for ongoing development. New code will be committed here, the repository will be world-readable and writable for the core-dev group. * http://source.squeak.org/tests This is the main repository for unit tests. It will be world-readable AND world-writable. We encourage everyone to write more tests and commit them, improve the existing tests and bring in entirely new test suites. * http://source.squeak.org/inbox This repository is intended as dropbox. Itâs usage will depend on what we make it out to be. The idea is to have it world-readable and world-writable, too. Developer access The board will manage developer access to the repositories at source.squeak.org. In the next days weâll send out a few âyou are pre-approvedâ messages to people who have proven to be active developers in the past in order to invite them to become a core developer. If you canât wait and absolutely want to be in on the action you can register yourself at http://source.squeak.org/ and send message to the board asking for access but most of the regular contributors (you know who you are) will be invited anyway. Rules of Engagement If you have used Monticello in projects with more than two developers in the past you already know the drill. If not, here are some useful guidelines: * Merge often. In particular when you pick up work and right before you intend to commit. * Exercise caution. This is a running system and breaking it needlessly is generally frowned upon. * Restrain yourself. Getting developer access doesnât mean you are free to put in every pet extension you always wanted to have without discussion. * If in doubt, ask. This is the corollary to the restrain yourself rule. Youâre not under pressure to ship a product, so you have the time to send a note saying âhey, Iâm planning to fix this old issue and it may have some side effect here or there. Anyone having a problem with that?â
Iâll add a Squeak-dev exception here: Any response from any non-developer can be entirely ignored in this context.
* You break it, you fix it. If you change something you are generally expected to take care of the consequences, though there are some exceptions. If in doubt, ask * Do good and talk about it. When youâre done with whatever it is youâve been working on let people know about it. It can be as short as a note to Squeak-dev saying âhey, some of you might care that Iâve fixed the long standing bug with xyz. Update and enjoyâ I think that roughly covers it. Basically you will be working with a dozen (hopefully more) other developers on Squeak and weâll all have to learn how to make this work successfully. Updating We are in the process of developing an update process that can work seamlessly with Monticello. An early experiment is described here. We are evaluating alternative approaches, in particular the use of Installer since there are some shortcomings when using Monticello Configurations. Existing Work It is important to note that we will be trying very hard not to lose any work that is being done for Squeak 3.11. We will start with the package set that was used in the 3.10 release, then we will issue package updates to cover the missing delta up until 3.10.2. Following which we will reissue any changes done for 3.11 into the repositories. Things you can do from here: - Subscribe to The Squeak Oversight Board Blog using Google Reader - Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites