Re: address@hidden: Re: [Jeff Bailey <address@hidden>] Re: [Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of GNU and FSF Organizational Files]

[Leonard H. Tower Jr.]

   Cc: address@hidden (Mark H. Weaver), Jeff Bailey <address@hidden>,
           address@hidden, address@hidden
   From: Hugo Gayosso <address@hidden>
   Date: 08 Mar 2001 23:01:41 -0500
   User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.7

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   "Joel N. Weber II" <address@hidden> writes:

   > I would like to request that
   > 
   > a) we wait at least a week before going to CVS, so that if there are
   > any other things that I haven't thought of yet, I can have a chance to
   > think of them.

   Agree.

Putting /gd/gnuorg under remote CVS, raises the learning curve for
non-hackers to help out with GNU.  And over the two decades of the GNU
Project there has been many of them.  It use to be enough to give them
an account, point them at the files, e-mail, and the GNU Emacs'
tutorial.  GNU Emacs even deals fairly well with local RCS/CVS.

You are proposing making things significantly more complicated for the
non-hacker.

I strongly suggest that putting /gd/gnuorg under remote CVS be done in
a way that makes it's easy for non-hackers to continue to help.

One thing to do, is to make sure that editing on the machine
/gd/gnuorg is on, continues to be supported.  Perhaps with automatic
commits of any changes.  

loic has been working towards doing this with the parts of www.gnu.org
that have been put under remote CVS

   > b) I'd like to hear how people plan to handle the things in
   > /gd/gnuorg/Makefile

   No comments due to ignorance.

It might be sufficient to put all the Makefile target files in a CVS
exclude file.  Something more complicated might be needed.

Whatever is done should be documented at the top of the Makefile.

   > c) I'd like to hear how people plan to handle /gd/gnuorg/volunteers-*

   I have already sent an email to GVC and to savannah-hackers explaining
   this, I will forward that email here too.

   > d) I'm wondering, if we're going to put this in CVS anyway, if some
   > sort of more global redisorganization would be sensible.  For
   > example, would be be better to have a directory for copyright
   > assignment papers, another directory for volunteer coordination
   > files, another for standards?

   I have already created a directory for volunteer stuff (Nov 2000), but
   I didn't move the file there I just created symlinks to some of the
   files needed by the GNU Volunteer Coordinators, plus some tools
   developed by me and others to search through the file.

   fencepost:/gd/gnuorg/gvc

   > gnuorg started out, I believe, as a subdirectory of RMS's homedir, I
   > would guess in 1984 or something, and no serious attempt has been made
   > to think about organization since then; if we're going to make the
   > drastic change of moving to CVS, we might as well think about how we
   > really want to have things organized.

   I definitely agree with this re-organization.

There is a lot of cruft in /gd/gnuorg that, at best, has some
historical interest.  Duplicating it on dozens of GNU volunteers disks
around the world might be viewed as a waste of resorces or a small
boon for the stockholders of disk makers.

   > e) For things in RCS, we should move the RCS history to the CVS
   > repository.  For things not in RCS, we should check in any backups
   > we have, ideally.

   Agree.

Definitely.

   - -- 
   Hugo Gayosso
   Support the Free Software
   Support the GNU Project 

best -len