Our SCM

[Karsten Wade]

On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 16:01 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:

> I'd really like there to be offline support in a manner that allows 
> non-commiters to be able to clone, modify, and provide a repo back to us that 
> we can pull from.

+1

I think the barrier described earlier is worse than we realize.  It may
seem like delving into technical details, but actually "centralized v.
distributed VCS" is actually a strategic question.

Strategically, we need to move _all_ of Fedora in the direction of
distributed VCS.

Honestly, this is the whole truth behind why we are working our arses
off in Docs and L10N to get new ways for people to be able to
contribute.  We *must* have the XML/PO-based tools to get the work done,
but making people go through all the hoops to gain write access to the
SCM means we get maybe 1% of the interested people from "I want to help"
to actually helping.

You see a larger successful percentage with developers because they have
been through the VCS account system learning curve in the past.  Not so
with people who want to write content or translate.  This is why
everything from GPG keys to CVS committing are so new to so much of our
prospective contributors.

So, Infrastructure is much closer to developers, in that the pool of
potentials are more likely to be clued.  But keeping it this hard to
contribute means we are missing out on the 10000x more people who are
not clued enough to get over the walls, but who would become so clued if
we could get them in and working their way along the path to
Enlightenment.

This goes back to the stuff Blizzard keeps talking about -- getting down
the barriers between users and developers that our open collaboration
tools ironically create.

</rant>

- Karsten
-- 
   Karsten Wade, 108 Editor       ^     Fedora Documentation Project 
 Sr. Developer Relations Mgr.     |  fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject
   quaid.108.redhat.com           |          gpg key: AD0E0C41
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