I will try sum up most of what is stated so far. Also it would seem that some claims need to be debunked and/or backed up.
Please correct me if I am wrong on anything (either in PM or preferably in the topic).
Also, my personal opinions will be in italics.SummaryFGAddon vs. FGMEMBERSBoth the
FGAddon and
FGMEMEBERS aircraft repos have high enough bus factors that there should be no worries if one or two people with commit rights would 'walk in front of a bus'.
The
FGDATA fork, with aircraft but as submodules and with complete history, was created with the intention that it could be used as a stand in for
FGData and FGAddon.
Though the bus factor of both should be enough, procedures ('how') could be documented better.
I think that there also is a need to document policies ('what and why') better. I guess the procedures for both to a large extend are spread out on the developer list and forum here and there (and most probably repeated, though with slight variations, at least over time). Policies for both seem rather informal and could be more formalized (not that this would not necessarily be the same as either 'strict' or set in stone). One good place for documentation is the FlightGear wiki (it also would be transparent about any changes).Claims that need debunkingWhy would FGAddon have to be the only officially sanctioned repo?FGAddon
is the official repo, period. It is located with the rest of the official FlightGear repos and is managed by the same people. These aircraft are also those that can be downloaded from the FlightGear web site and soon from within FlightGear itself.
Any other repo would therefore a non-official/third party repo. That said, non-official/third party repo aircraft are not necessarily worse or of less value.
Splitting the aircraft folder away from the rest of the files had been discussed for years. Due to the extremely large size of in particular the FGData repo on Gitorious, there had been friction between FlightGear and Gitorious and something needed to be done (apparently FlightGear have nearly been kicked out twice in the past,
according to Zakalawe).
What was done was that Clément took contact with the staff of SourceForge and kindly asked about the possibilities to move there, making sure that they had full knowledge of the size of the repos. SourceForge agreed to host the repos, though unfortunately they would not agree to host the scenery.
It is also quite clear that Clément both reported back to the developer mailing list thus doing it in the open and that he had no intention be the only one with commit access.
The emails and discussion about the move are fortunately archived on the developer list. See in particular the thread
[Flightgear-devel] Splitting of fgdata (Apr-Sep 2014).
Sure, I have some disagreements about how hastily it was done. I am not fully sure that SVN necessarily would be the right way to do it, and in particular I am not found of that the commit history seems to have been scrapped. But lets face it, splitting the aircraft from FGData and moving them away from Gitorious had to be done, one way or another.Some thoughts on commit rights
About commit rights to the FGAddon repository. A common policy among most projects involving people submitting to a repository (be that Git, SVN or just a bunch of files in a directory on a file server) is to not give people commit/write rights before having they have demonstrated that patches and files they request inclusion of are free from larger or obvious errors for a while. After all, few would hire a complete stranger they just met on the street that stated he is good with this or that and right away give him the keys to a work place and its machinery.
I sincerely hope any aircraft developer would not get commit rights right away either, even if they would only have access to their own aircraft. In the same manner a committer that causes problems due to how he would commit could really not be expected to have continued commit access. This would pretty much be the same as if someone who use a machine at work would not be allowed to use it if he would cause a lot of work for other having to fix problems he caused.The author of the dash DaSH was mistreatedUnfortunately the ticket that has been mentioned
for example here, ticket number 3
can not be found so I can not really see what the motivation Clément had for not including the
DaSH. However Torsten (without an 'h') stated that:
Torsten wrote in Tue Apr 21, 2015 9:06 pm:The dash was rejected in it's presented state due to technical issues (temporary files, undescriptive name and others). Once these issues are solved and somebody volunteers as a maintainer, it is more than welcome to fgaddon.
In essence, the issue is neither unsolvable nor permanent.
This is one of the clear cut cases where some discussion backed published guidelines would both have made Cléments decision easier as well as would soften any arguments about whether or not it was not right.Thorsten stole HerbyW's Space Shuttle and replaced it on FGAddon with his ownInitially the Space Shuttle in FlightGear was just a re-entry FDM without even a very simple 3D model. Some work was done over the years to improve that. See for example the topics
NASA Space Shuttle (Apr 2007-Nov 2010),
Space Shuttle (Jul 2012) and
Adventures in Space (Dec 2013). Note that Thorsten (with an 'h') have played around with a space shuttle before one way or another.
As far as I can see HerbyW's version is a fork from the official 'shuttle' one (in essence from
this commit in FGAddon) with
this being his first commit. Given that it is therefore GPL as well as publicly published Thorsten could not possibly have stolen it.
Also, considering this post ...
HerbyW wrote in Mon Mar 23, 2015 8:06 pm:Thorsten:
...
10. but I guess eventually the orbiter needs to be replaced by Jons
Here are the answer to the main points from the main developer of the space program:
...
10. Ok, replace it and have fun with it. We take ours and have fun too.
... it seems Thorsten had HerbyW's consent to fork his version (even though he formally would not have needed it). Claims about Thorsten abusing the GPL license are thus unfounded. In addition he has in no way made a coexistence impossible in that he added it as 'SpaceShuttle', with
this commit being the initial one.
At the other hand, while Thorsten had not yet added it to a repo, as he did not consider his version to be in a publishable condition yet, IAHM-COL downloaded the preview and added it to the FGMEMBERS repo (hopefully he misunderstood Thorsten). Though annoying, this is is fully in line with the GPL (as Thorsten admits):
Thorsten wrote in Mon Mar 30, 2015 6:28 pm:If you're really asking for the license, as it's based on GPL stuff (lots of things from Vitos' Vostok, some leftovers from the FG Space Program thing, Jon's attempt...) it has to be GPL. If you're asking whether you can put it onto a repo, I can't prevent you from doing it, but there's a reason I have not done it... What ends up on a repo should basically work for a number of use cases and be somewhat tested whereas this is not yet at this stage...
IAHM-COL wrote in Mon Mar 30, 2015 6:36 pm:... I will mount it in FGMEMBERs so our FGDATA next users can fetch, and enjoy. ...