On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 12:38:50AM +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
I'd like to ask a question (or rather two):
- Are there any plans on using GNOME CVS and GNOME Bugzilla
for Inkscape development?
We've been using SourceForge CVS since the project started. Sodipodi (Inkscape's predecessor) was in GNOME CVS. At the time, getting a CVS account for GNOME was a bit too manual of a process (requiring bugging GNOME administrators.) Those of us who had been Sodipodi developers had found that being allowed access to GNOME CVS was difficult and time consuming; IIRC it took several months for me to get GNOME CVS access. Also, since Inkscape was born as a fork of Sodipodi, there was also some worry that GNOME would not allow us to use their CVS. The main downside we faced was that we'd lose the involvement of the GNOME translators, which we'd had very good experiences with in Sodipodi. A second downside is that SourceForge CVS has been problematic (and slow) compared with GNOME CVS.
However, despite being outside GNOME's translation community, we've nonetheless gained very good involvement from translators. Certainly not 115 languages, but then my guess is that many of those languages are not actively maintained anyway, and that Inkscape would not gain translations into more than a few new languages.
Translation looks to be pretty simple - for a given language there is just one file to update. Certainly that file is important, but important enough to warrant changing CVS? I guess I'm unclear on particularly why GNOME CVS makes translation so much easier?
Now, we *have* seriously considered switching how we manage source code, but I think the general concensus is that we want to move *away* from CVS to something like Subversion, that would give us more powerful code management. Our hope is that SourceForge will eventually implement this, although since SF seems to be taking a long time to get this, I think we'd consider other Subversion providers.
Anyway, you may be right that it would make things more convenient for the GNOME translators, and it's possible that would gain us more translations. On the other hand, it risks making it more difficult for new developers to get CVS accounts, would take a lot of effort to migrate, and it doesn't correspond with our ultimate goal to move to Subversion anyway... So it's not entirely clear to me if this is worth the effort of doing. It might help to have a better idea of specifically how many GNOME developers/translators would contribute significantly to Inkscape if it was in GNOME CVS. I assume most people that wish to contribute to Inkscape would be able to just upload patches or request a CVS account from us.
We've also considered alternate bug trackers, but most people are suitably comfortable with the SourceForge tracker so there's no plans to change. I'm not sure what Bugzilla would buy us, other than imposing a more confusing user interface on our poor users. ;-) If we did change we'd probably adopt Mantis rather than Bugzilla.
Bryce