Moving cruft from svn.gnome.org to svn-archive.gnome.org

I just fired of this email to devel-announce-list and gnome-infrastructure:

A while back Andre Klapper and myself started an effort to clean up
the svn repository by moving inactive modules to the archive. The goal
at that time was both to ease the transition from cvs to svn and to
get a cruft free svn server.

We started out by identifying the modules with no checkins in 1.5
years. For those modules we started sending out emails to whoever
seemed like the person responsible for that module. This would be
decided by first looking at the MAINTAINERS file, AUTHORS file and
last option was to look at the last person to do a checkin. 23
responded that their module could be moved, a few asked that their
module stay, but most of the time the email bounced or was not
responded to.

Olav recently set the svn-archive.gnome.org and started moving the
modules that did not request to stay to that. Moving modules back and
forth from the archive is no problem so if any of the modules listed
here should have stayed please mail svnmaster at gnome.org and they will
be moved back. Please also check that the MAINTAINERS file has the
correct email listed.

*snip* (long list of modules)

Thinking back all it took was a little motivation to help out and an easy task to get started at. All it required was a copy/paste from svn.gnome.org/viewvc to get the list of modules; some “svn log –limit 1 http://svn.gnome.org/svn/MODULE-NAME“-ing to get the dates; a wiki page to track the progress as we were collaborating; oh, and a heck of a lot of emails 🙂

I think there are two points here:

• Getting started at contributing to GNOME is really easy. You can walk right in as a complete stranger and start helping out. And you don’t need to be a coder.
• Asking for help works. If you have a task anyone could do, just ask. Make it easy for wannabe contributers to see where they can help out.