* Raphael Hertzog: " Re: Future of the Tryton suite in Debian" (Mon, 9 Apr 2018 16:27:04 +0200):
Hello Raphael, > Hello Mathias, > > On Thu, 05 Apr 2018, Mathias Behrle wrote: > > I don't plan to continue the maintenance of the Tryton suite in my *free* > > time. > > :-( > > > The current evaluation of the situation shows unfortunately a different > > result: > > - After years of continued discussions and confrontations I have to realize, > > that the Tryton project still doesn't meet my least expectations of a real > > community project. > > Can you elaborate? I will elaborate a little bit to duely answer your questions, but I certainly don't want to shift a discussion here on a Debian list, that should essentialy take place inside the Tryton project (but in my experience is not welcome, but rather avoided by all means). > My own experience is limited and I have the feeling > that it's largely operated by Cédric Krier acting like a benevolent > dictator for life. Indeed the project is operated by B2CK, a two person company. One of them being the leader in SABDFL style (Cédric Krier), the other being the head of the Tryton foundation (Nicolas Evrard). While the project is claimed to be a community project, it is setup in narrow confines to suit the needs of the de-facto editors B2CK. That said you will search in vain for some sort of public and transparent project governance. As a direct consequence the project loses a lot of potential contributors. Beginners are often straightaway tired after having taken (or eventually not) the initial ridiciously high barrier of code contribution just to correct a typo. Others (me included) just refuse to be forced to register an account with google to be able to upload reviews. OTOH the contribution of just patches is commented with the formal hint to 'How to contribute'. Despite the constant lack of ressources there was until now never a serious move to open up the project to e.g. spread the load. Spreading the load means spreading responsibility and trust in co-workers. But even so said core committers are waiting for the LGTM of the leader, other contributors have obviously to wait, until the leader finds time to do personally the commit. Those are just some few examples of my perception of bottlenecks in the project, that after all seem to be volitional to keep the project under the tight control of one person resp. one company. > But still it's much better than any other similar project in this scope > that I know of. You know Debian, don't you? ;) I know a number of projects, that don't hesitate to work and publish a transparent project governance. Projects that have comprehensible, documented and transparent guidelines and procedures to be followed to e.g. judge about the meritocracy of a contributor. Finally we are both in this very project Debian that has extraordinary qualities in this respect. To be concise: we are talking here about the project setup, not about code quality. While often missing thourough planing of features with the input of experts from different domains, I absolutely concur with the usually excellent code quality of the project. > I have been able to contribute my > changes and I even got commit rights on a module (account_fr). Yes, I know. That was certainly due to the fact that you provided at that time excellent patches with exemplary commit messages (finally you showed to ..hmmm.. how really exhaustive commit messages can look like), but also due to the fact that you are a very well known and reputable person in Debian. It's great that it is that way. There could be many more. > > Furthermore the work of maintaining Tryton in Debian is > > quite low valued in Tryton. > > But it is highly valued here in Debian and by the many tryton users out > there. I am pleased to here that. At least for the Debian part. I can not follow for the *many* Tryton users out there. If that should be the case they miss clearly to make their voice heard on the project. > > Constitutional questions and differing opinions > > are mostly considered annoying. There is a clear tendance to prefer > > exclusive instead of inclusive behavior (which e.g. recently led due to > > poor and repudiative communication to the removal of the OpenSUSE packages > > from the website). > > Again, can you elaborate and be more specific? Just some pointers to form your own opinion: The issue https://bugs.tryton.org/issue7111 History of the issue https://bugs.tryton.org/issue5375 Issue on OpenSUSE https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1078111 And a discussion thread on tryton-dev https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tryton-dev/4fWWO0C5hvA > > - The benefit of Tryton in Debian main is quite limited for our users. To > > get a sustainable solution it is mostly better to use the backports at > > debian.tryton.org. Thus the packages in main are indeed a very good base > > to start the backports from, but they are not really the best alternative > > for everyday use. > > I am mainly using your backports, yes. Glad to hear and thanks for your interest. Cheers, Mathias -- Mathias Behrle PGP/GnuPG key availabable from any keyserver, ID: 0xD6D09BE48405BBF6 AC29 7E5C 46B9 D0B6 1C71 7681 D6D0 9BE4 8405 BBF6
