[Product-Developers] Collective etiquette

David Glick davidglick at groundwire.org
Sat Jun 11 20:50:07 UTC 2011


On 6/11/11 1:41 PM, Michael A. Smith wrote:
> Hi, I have a couple of quick patches I was thinking about submitting to a collective project that is not my own, and I wanted to get your thoughts on the etiquette of the collective.
>
> 1. I've already committed some whitespace-consistency, spelling, and syntax-error fixes that were preventing the HEAD revision from running on a couple of projects. No-one has complained, but did I cross a line? (I hope not, but it only occurred to me that that might not be appreciated after the fact.)
These sorts of fixes are usually fine to commit without checking with 
the author first. (They are pretty uncontroversial, and anyway we have 
version control if something needs to be reverted.) For anything more 
substantial I try to contact the author, but will go ahead and make 
fixes if they seem to be AWOL.
> 2. What constitutes an abandoned/languishing project? Take collective.ckeditor, which hasn't been touched in 9 mo. Its listed owner is Ingeniweb, which seems to have been replaced by Alter Way, which in turn doesn't seem to do Zope afaict. Is this project "fair game"? (I'm not saying I want to take it over, necessarily, but talking in generalities.)
If you've tried to contact the author and got no response after a 
reasonable wait, it's probably fair game.  If the identity of the author 
is unclear you can email this list and see if someone knows.  In general 
if a project looks dead it's also probably worth doing a search to see 
if the repository got moved somewhere else like github.
> 3. For our own projects, is there some standard way we (as collective.X product "owners") can signal to other collective contributors whether or not we would welcome commits to trunk? (As opposed to branching and forking, which are protected rights in free software)
Add a paragraph in the readme.


----------		
David Glick
 Web Developer
 davidglick at groundwire.org
 206.286.1235x32

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