stéphane ducasse wrote:
> I thought that it could be a work for the foundation but we do not  want 
> to open
> a war or destroy the community by proposing that someone get payed to  
> help us
> to fix the process/problem. Once I asked Ned if he could help and  been 
> payed
> but again we do not know how to proceed.
I think that is not a good solution. One commercial model that works 
well is when a commercial entity fixes things for itself. Our example is 
impara (who created the model we started from for MC update stream, 
because it was useful to them), another one is Ubuntu. The community 
directly paying people to do stuff seems like poison to me.

> So if you have any suggestion think twice before but now there is  still 
> time to say
> something and make sure that the process support itself.
First I want to say that I think we're doing really well in eating up 
this learning curve, and the need for a learning curve is natural. We 
will still have to invest in more MC improvements, and it will take 
time, but if we simply postpone merging contributions that are 
problematic under the current model (things requiring a bootstrap), I 
think we'll do pretty well. If you're having problems with using MC for 
the regular contributions, be specific.

And the problematic ones
a: we always somewhat problematic, though we were more used to their 
workaround
b: we will get to those, if not this version, the next.
c: when we get to them, will still be reasonably easy to merge, because 
MC does that.

> But right  now 
> I do not see how
> we can continue like that. Seriously, I have fun to clean, harvest  
> fixes but
> not like that and we need help.

So I think we need:
1. More people with deep MC knowledge helping out. Any of you that are 
willing and still not there, please join the 
packages at discuss.squeakfoundation.org list. If you don't have it yet, 
but are using MC already, you should consider making the plunge. MC is 
already a very useful tool to many of us, but the fact is that it could 
improve much faster with a bigger active community of developers. There 
is now a squeaksource.com project for it that people can be added to, if 
you have code contribution, join up.
2. More people merging stuff from the inbox repository in source.sqf.org 
and from mantis, living with it, patching it, and releasing new versions 
to inbox, therefore leaving only merging into 3.9a to the harvesters.

Daniel