[Cfengine-develop] my own branch of the tree

[Luke A. Kanies]

Hi all,

(How many of us are there on this list?)

It looks like Mark is incredibly busy as usual right now, and there are
some patches (one especially) I think are necessary and useful
but which he is not going to be able to look at until at any time soon.
I also would really like to provide this functionality to a client of
mine, as it would allow me to cease some of my code generation.  And last
but not least, I plan to begin providing commercial support for cfengine
this year (hopefully in Q1), and I will need my own branch to help
customers out until my patches can be accepted into the main branch.

As a result, I've decided to start maintaining my own branch of cfengine.
I can't say at this point how much it will end up differening from the
main branch; if it's just me, I expect not many differences, but if others
are interested in participating, then it could be quite a bit.

I'm pretty happy with cfengine, but there are some aspects of it that make
it frustrating to use, and I think some of those aspects could be fixed
relatively easily.  For whatever reasons, Mark does not seem to be
frustrated by these same limitations and thus is not very interested in
fixing them. I'm willing to spend at least some time trying to make those
fixes, and I would very much appreciate help both in writing the fixes and
in testing them.  I will immediately provide read access to my CVS
repository, which means that at the least there will be a place that
provides anonymous CVS access to Mark's copy of cfengine (I'll sync it
from him nightly or something), but it also should make it very easy to
update from and contribute to my (or his) branch.

I will also provide some mechanism for submitting and sharing patches, so
that multiple people can vet a patch before I accept it to the branch but
also so that people are encouraged to send patches.  Patches are
definitely good, even if the patches aren't good. :)

Basically, I just want to encourage more participation in cfengine
development, both in getting patches and in testing them.  Mark is too
busy to do much development, patch vetting, or testing, so it's time the
community stepped in to help out, and this seems to be the easiest and
best way for us to do that right now.

I would definitely welcome any feedback, including chastisement, blame, or
flames.  If you have any better ideas on how to spur development, I'd love
to hear them.  I don't even expect to spend a ton of time on this, as I
have my own development work I want to do, but there are features I need,
bugs I need fixed (some that Mark does not consider bugs), and lots of
refactoring to be done, all of which I am willing to work on.

I'm largely considering this similar to Alan Cox (not that I deserve
comparison to him) maintaining his own branch of linux; it's not
competition, but he has his own ideas of what should be in there, and he's
patient in getting those ideas to the main tree.

Feel free to mail me directly with questions or concerns.

Luke Kanies

-- 
  "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a
minute.  But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it's longer
than any hour.  That's relativity."   --Albert Einstein