Dear Lazyweb,
I have been stuck with a problem for quite sometime now. The new account system for getting Gnome SVN accounts – Mango – behaves a bit oddly at times. The following are the problems that I have seen happening in the past:
#1: There was no option to request an account as a Translator. It got fixed eventually.
#2: A voucher is required for a Translator, when she/he requests for an svn account. The voucher is essentially the Translation Team co-ordinator and to ensure that happens, the person requesting the account has to select the Translation Team from a dropdown menu in the New Accounts page. Sounds easy? Well not exactly, if your team is not present in the dropdown list.
#3: So up next, one has to file a bug against Mango to get the team listed.
#4: The team is not listed on the dropdown menu if the Team’s coordinator does not have an account. Pretty valid. But then how does the co-ordinator request an account, if Mango is the way and the language team will not be listed until she/he actually has an account. Chicken-egg….gaah!
#5: And even if the co-ordinator does have an account, things might not be all that rosy. ( Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali-India have valid co-ordinators with existing accounts. In case of Kannada, the account stopped working for Pramod one fine day. Marathi has a somewhat similar situation.)
To be honest, I am completely frustrated. It is understandable, that with limited number of volunteer sysadmins things might run slow. However, the complaints need to be addressed some way or the other. Here in India, most of the language groups are close to each other and the problems come across too starkly.
I don’t know if anyone from Gnome actually reads my mails to the mailing list (most linked above). I was really hoping that someone who could help out would read these words and do something about it. It would be much appreciated around here.
regards
Runa
so much for openness. The larger a project gets, the harder it is to balance openness v/s paranoia.
More than paranoia.. its a missing link someplace. Atleast for this one. 😦
by paranoia, I mean the policies that go in to restrict who can develop and who cannot. small FOSS projects don’t have that. If you are capable of contributing, your contribution is welcome. For a large project, you not only need to be capable of contributing, you must also be capable of following standards from patch one, you must be reputed and you need someone to vouch for you.
Some day they may even ask you which countries you’ve visited prior to your contribution, or where you were when you wrote the code, because it’s illegal for women to contribute to this project while sitting at Mount Athos in Greece.
From what I know there is lot of GNOME which would be shifting to some dvcs
http://treitter.livejournal.com/6573.html
http://blogs.gnome.org/johncarr/2008/06/23/dvcs-mirror-updates/
http://blogs.gnome.org/jamesh/2008/07/09/dvcs-guadec/
Once this happens, then the possibility of having your own branch to do whatever u want to do is possible without having the issues you are having now.