2010/7/7 <david@lang.hm>:
On Fri, 2 Jul 2010, vtl@scls.lib.wi.us wrote:
From: "vtl@scls.lib.wi.us" <vtl@scls.lib.wi.us>
What seems clear from this exchange is that PTFS/Liblime believes that it is the responsibility of others to integrate their code into Koha rather than something that is inherent to the process of working on an open source project. If this is the case, then LEK and Harley are not trunks. They're forks.
Owen--how is that clear? When did anyone say that PTFS/LibLime believes that it is not their responsibility to integrate the code? I was at the very same meeting. LEK is a fork that PTFS inherited, yet I understood from the meeting that they are committed to contributing it to Koha, difficult as that may be.
Nothing that they said about Harley led me to believe that they think it is the community's responsibility to integrate the code. I believe that there are several people at PTFS/LibLime who understand the process and they have already put a lot of work into Koha.
both sides will need to work to integrate this functionality (or re-write it if that ends up being easier)
having either side take the attitude that it's all up to the other side will only make the problem drag out longer. It's very unfurtunant that this problem is here, but the entities that decided not to merge the code earlier are no longer around, and it's far better to assume good intent on the part of their replacements than it is to punish the reaplacements for the bad actions of their predesessors.
Hi David I don't think anyone is punishing the replacements for their predecessors, at least I am not. What I am reacting to is the policy that came out at the liblime users group meeting at ALA. Which states that code will be developed in isolation by PTFS, it will then go through a testing phase, and then liblime customers will get it for a period of 6 months. At that point it will then be placed in a public repository for the rest of the world. At no point in that plan is there any consideration for integration, or is there any recognition of the fact that for the code to have any value at all to the wider koha community that it would need to have been rebased off master at regular intervals. As in illustration, in the last 6 months of koha development, there have been over 1000 patches added to Koha. 2010-07 019 2010-06 103 2010-05 203 2010-04 120 2010-03 146 2010-02 305 2010-01 154 So let alone the time it takes to develop factored in, code based on Koha as it was 6 months ago, needs a significant amount of work to bring it up to a point we could even begin to merge it. What I am is concerned about is that PTFS are repeating the mistakes of their predecessors. There is still no commitment to send patches for the code in a form that can actually be applied. That sounds to me exactly like Owen describes. There is a rumour that a document describing the Liblime development procedure has been sent to the Liblime list, it would be wonderful if that could be made public so that our fears could either be allayed or confirmed. I would like nothing better than for PTFS to begin sending patches, or making feature set branches available in a usable form for the community to integrate, after all we have over 114 developers in the history of Koha, they seem to have managed to be able to do it. Chris