Proposed passing of the baton

I’ve had a couple goals I wanted to help push during my time on the release team (r-t) to improve how things work: document the r-t processes better for other new members, make r-t processes more fail-safe, and make a few things work more smoothly (make it easier to build a development version of GNOME, make it easier to do GNOME releases, etc.). With the help of the team and the development community at large, I feel like most of these have been achieved. It took longer than expected and there’s always room for further improvement[1], but I’m very happy with the progress so far.

Anyway, I think it’s definitely time for a change; I’ve been in my role for a couple years now (about a year longer than I initially thought I would be). As I mentioned on d-d-l, I’ve proposed to have Vincent take the reins as the release team manager. Some of you may have thought he already was given how active he always is; it’s really hard to keep up with him. I’ll still stick around on the team and help out for now, but it’s time to switch roles and I think vuntz will do a wonderful job taking over the reins.

[1] I particularly like and agree with Owen’s suggestion to create standard jhbuild configurations.

Learning new version control systems

Rather interestingly, the subject of DSCMs[1] has come up on various GNOME mailing lists.  I’ve always been peripherally interested in them, and have read at least several dozen articles/blogs/howtos/comparisons/etc. on them.  I even tried one a number of years ago, but unfortunately picked a horribly awful one that was so amazingly painful to learn and use (in more ways than you’d think possible)[2] that I’ve avoided adopting any others for a long time.

Now, I have made very basic use of both bzr and git in the past (only used a subset of the basic features of each) — but both were some time ago.  I’ve heard that both have changed quite a bit since then, which is good, or neither would be fit for use.  (bzr was painfully slow even on small personal projects, and git was beyond unreasonably complex to attempt to learn.)

So, between the recent interest in both the GNOME and the KDE camps, and wanting to find something nice to advocate replacing CVS at work, it’s probably time for me to start learning some new version control systems and making my own comparison so that I can participate intelligently in the discussions.  cvs, svn, git, bzr, hg, and possibly others, Oh My!  (That doesn’t have the same ring as “lions, and tigers, and bears!  Oh My!”, does it?)

[1] Distributed Source Content Management systems, though I dislike the name as it is somewhat misleading. It implies that the systems must be used in a decentralized way, when in reality the difference is that these version control systems come with distributed capabilities as well as centralized ones. Xorg is an example that uses a DSCM in a largely centralized way (or at least was), and that’s how I’d expect GNOME to use it and most users to use them (at least at first).

[2] The system was tla (and baz), for the curious.

Sorry for disappearing…

For those that noticed, sorry for having disappeared completely this past week. I was under the weather with bronchitis. I could hardly even eat or walk on Monday, and am still a way off from 100%. If you’re waiting on me for anything…you may be waiting a while.

The good news is that despite being the final week before the big 2.20 release, there seems to not have been a single hiccup with the release process. (Granted, I’ve only had the energy to do a little reading/responding and I still have a huge email backlog, but everything looks encouraging that I’ve seen.) Many thanks to all the release team members who stepped up and took over the slack. It’s very encouraging that if any one of us suddenly goes out of commission, there are others on the team who are willing and capable of taking over and ensuring things get done.