[sylpheed:34055] Improving Sylpheed development process.

[Antonio Ospite]

Hi,

We all like Sylpheed as users, it's fast, clean, lightweight, but
as developers we must admit it's not the most dynamic Open Source
project around here.
If I had to describe Sylpheed development model I'd say it is basically
Hiro-centric, which is not at all bad /per se/, but I feel this
sometimes can limit external contribution.

So if we manage to refresh the development, still keeping Hiro as
the one who makes final decisions, I think our favorite MUA can improve
even further.

Let me list the things I feel can be improved and please let me know
yours as developers, telling also if some change can make you contribute
_more_ to Sylpheed.

Have a bugtracker:
  Bugs reports and feature requests are lost in the mailing list,
  unorganized and often uncommented, this makes difficult to classify,
  remember and finally address them.

Use a modern (distributed[1]) SCM, as subversion is a little clumsy to
my eyes:
  - this will make people make their own experiments off-line much more
    easily, and then propose them to the Sylpheed developer[s] in a
    clean and consistent way, this can be done already some how, but
    there is also the next reason:
  - the SCM should differentiate between the author of a change and the
    actual committer: if I contribute a change to Sylpheed I want that
    reflected in the project history, this is not only desirable in
    order to give credit, but also useful to assign responsibility to
    code changes.

This can motivate external contributions IMHO, at the end of the day
Open Source is about _people_.

Let me know if you agree on what are the weak spots, so we can start to
talk about how to address them. Of course this is under the assumption
that there are (or there will be) people willing to contribute to
Sylpheed :) If you are one of them, please speak up.

Regards,
   Antonio

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control_system

-- 
Antonio Ospite
http://ao2.it

PGP public key ID: 0x4553B001

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