"Russell Penney" <russell.penney at tincanct.com> wrote:
> So ...
> Have a look at the Debian process (seeing people keep talking about it as a
> model). http://qa.debian.org/howto.html is one place to start.
> 

Interestingly enough, we do have a page just like that one:

	http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3279

It's linked under the "Community" area on the front page.  I've never
noticed the Debian version of thi.  I actually find wading Debian's site
as difficult as wading the Swiki, when it comes to figuring out what
*exactly* the processes are.  I only know the parts I am involved with,
and even there I just go with the flow.

The biggest thing our harvesting process seems to lack compared to
Debian's bug tracking approach, is that in Debian, bugs can be routed
around to people who can actually solve them. If someone posts a bug to
gnome-terminal, the gnome-terminal guy can re-route the bug report to
lib-gnome-blahblah if it seems appropriate.  Right now, on Mantis,
everyone has to scan the whole bug log to find stuff they would know
anything about.  I have been meaning, one day, to go searching for a bug
tracker that can route bugs to packages, but have not had time to do so
yet....

Anyway, it is no use for the central 300 klocs of code in the basic
image.  (Yes, 300 klocs.  Our base image is dangerously close to
spontaneously gaining conciousness.)  Which gets back to the issue of
partitioning the image.


So, it seems like partitioning the image is a prerequisite to getting a
really good process for dealing with bugs and patches.  Since
partitioning is an advantage in other ways anyway -- reducing the code
where we ALL have to agree on, and reducing pressure on the main patch
harvesting process -- it seems like partitioning should be a very high
priority.  300 klocs is daunting, and will take a while to dice into
little pieces, but we have a good crew around here.....  



> Hey everybody 125 bugs were solved this month!!!!

Incidentally, we do have a lot of patches going in.  There is definitely
progress in the  basic image...  progress in *some* direction.


-Lex