Morning guys,
let me have a few words on this subject …
1. The problem startet with the development section of the forum (offered even in two languages - german and english). This implies that development of IPFire as well as add-ons is taking place there. Far later someone might realize, that there is another place (this mailing-list) where the actual development evolves.
2. What I have seen as answers on this mailing-list, the majority just wants a secure, ip-table based router with an web-interface. If that is the case, at least 80% of the current add-ons should be kicked out. Even quite a lot of the so called core is obsolet.
3. Marcel has clearly marked our development as ‚project‘. He even wrote a nice (not 100% finished yet) installer script to add and remove the functionality of the project(s) to IPFire. As far as I know, neither Marcel or anybody else of the people involved in the project have asked for help from the core developers (who ever they are …) or requested integration of the project into IPFire.
4. If you like or not, the language barrier is there. You can actually see it in this discussion. I am pretty sure, some expressions weren’t meant as they were - harsh. Talking about technical features in a foreign language is a total different thing than to express yourself or your opinion about something.
Michael, I hope you can contemplate about your conclusion, may be even think about dropping the mailing-list instead. Just in case you are sticking to the mailing-list and this procedure of development of IPFire, I kindly ask you where can I find the rules and procedures of involvement in writing (please don’t answer wiki.ipfire.org http://wiki.ipfire.org/ …).
BTW - I am very interested about the development of IPFire v3. So far I haven’t been able to find much about it beside some sources in the git - is there another place I should go ??
brgds and have a nice weekend Dirk
Am 23.01.2016 um 03:19 schrieb Michael Tremer michael.tremer@ipfire.org:
Hello,
so to put an end to this discussion (I think we have heard the opinions of everyone who this matters to), I would like to quickly recap and propose some actions we/I will now take.
So Marcel (aka gocart on the forums) has unfortunately contacted me privately because he doesn't want to discuss this on this mailing list for several reasons. He allowed me to publish the content of that conversation. I won't post the full text (it is in German any way), but pick some points that I found interesting.
The first of the reasons why he is not taking part in this conversation on this list is that there is a language barrier and secondly he finds this list "useless". The latter one of these left me quite puzzled. I expressed my disappointment about that and asked again that he would think about it but there has been no reply.
He agrees that there have to be rules when many people are working together, but he does not accept ours. Even having this debate about these rules is a waste of time to him. It actually is, but rules have to be set up and and they have to be challenged from time to time.
Upstreaming work is a matter of leaving it in a git repository until somebody takes over. He is refusing a discussion about his work.
Just to remind you: This was never about just him. There are other parallel projects. He is just the only person who voiced himself a little bit. The others didn't.
So I come to my personal conclusion that I will just leave the stuff as it is. I won't talk with these people as there is clearly no point. I won't feel a bit responsible for what they are doing there.
If someone wants to take their stuff and post it to the list in an orderly fashion that is something else. Maybe these people can agree that one member of the team is talking to the rest of the developers as a spokesman. I find that just silly, but there might be other ways.
For me, stuff happens on this list. Nowhere else. Period.
The other consequence I am taking is to rename the development area on the forums. My first idea was to just get rid of it, but I guess people will be posting their stuff in other sub-forums then. So it will just be renamed to clearly state that this is *not* the place where development happens so that nobody can complain that "the developers" don't reply to their posts. There is this list. There is Bugzilla. These are the places to go.
I hope that these changes will improve the situation. I am in no way trying to deter those contributors from contributing to this project. I am trying to do the opposite which is to steer them towards contributing their patches in a way that we can review them, improve them if necessary, and then merge them into the distribution so that IPFire becomes better. This process however needs to follow rules and it appears that we have to enforce those even more.
Feel free to comment on this, but please keep it short if you can because I want to focus on other things. Just in case someone is interested in the PMs from Marcel let me know and I will post them, too.
Best, -Michael