"Brad Fuller" <brad at sonaural.com> wrote:
[SNIP]
> But, in addition and more important: After reviewing this link, I don't have
> to tell you experienced ones that the approval process is somewhat of a
> problem from a quality standpoint. For instance, ONE harvester can "approve"
> a submission to be included in the image (and, it could be his/her own
> submission) -- there is no mandated peer review, or even a peer review
> process for that matter. I trust that everyone intimately understands the
> other issues and problems with this process.

You know... I claim the total opposite. :) The process we have now is
somewhat bureaucratic and even though it works "kinda" it would be
better if the process was much more agile. Normally open source projects
don't have this kind of process for core development - only for
contributions coming in from the outside.

> Has a proposal been put forth in the past to improve this process? I for one
> would like to see this tighter.

"Tighter" would "kill" the joy and joy is what we thrive on. In fact -
as I said - we need a swifter process with more trust in the experienced
developers. The harvesting process is perfectly fine for handling ENHs
and FIXes coming in from less experienced developers - but it should
IMHO not be used for core development by the more active experienced
Squeakers.

We need something similar to a CVS with an update/commit process based
on trusted core developers. And I think we may try to put something like
that in place pretty soon - there have been a few experiments. And even
if we don't put that in place for the image - it is used or can be used
for the packages being broken out of the image.

What we also need is less centralization and more personal
responsibility. That can be had using packages and maintainers. So...
more packages! More maintainers! :)

regards, Göran