Gijs wrote in Thu Feb 12, 2015 10:48 pm:I'm not trying to downplay your effort (you can look it up, but I've been doing pretty much the same over three years ago, we got very close back then to what you're trying to achieve). But, this is such a fundamental part of the project that it needs to have a broad consensus to be accepted.
Your questions really have a far better chance of getting answers on the mailing list than on this forum. The mailing list is just that, a list of email address that receive a copy of your email if you send it to the list. See our wiki for details:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Mailing_list
Hi Gijs
Thanks for your suggestion.
As you requested me, I did send a devel-list email requesting everyone to consider the submodule as a feasible alternative to the aircraft being hosted in SVN. I am certain that you are subscribed and therefore you have access to first-hand information of what the comments and opinions that took place there. You were right that I was more likely to get some response from the dev-cores by talking on a more appropriate channel than the forum, so I definitely thank you for pointing me in the right direction.
To summarize, the dev-cores never reached a broad consensus that you pointed above, but a subset of them did definitely decide to take the lead move and displace the aircraft to a SVN fork. The discussions of how the aircraft migration were very long and took a large toll on many developers that felt rather tired to keep up the fight, so those that were more in favor of the git move as oppose to an SVN move just saw the thing happening and remained silent, which had been taken by the executers of the SVN move, much to their convenience, as a silent agreement.
Their defense on their system of SVN is basically that what I claimed before. It is not a question of whether it is the best move. It is a problem of what is done is done. No need to revert decisions. No need to evaluate potentially better ones. They claim it to be a sensible move, which off course for those running the trains, a centralized server makes a lot of sense, thus is a sensible solution. They do not care of possible consequences this can have on the fostering collaborations and maintain an opensource approach to the project. Some of them do consider that since they are not aircraft developers, a suboptimal decision is one not affecting them directly, and thus they are, conveniently apathetic.
In summary, there seems to be a very low interest to negotiate or discuss a possibility to improve and foster aircraft developement cooperations. That seems to be the consensus reached. Just leave the SVN without questioning if the submodular proposal is technically a sound and better alternative. The only consensus reached is apparently; "I don't care". "This is not my problem". and "It is too late for considering a reversal".
As a matter of fact, I think comradery, instead of professional judgement once again has taken a bigger lead into the decisions occuring in flightgear, some of which do occur actually in secret weekendly meetings. I hope one day I get to belong to that secret -almost massonic- group, but for now I am barely an end user of this fantastic software.
With all previous considerations in mind, I will be addressing the questions you proposed (and I quoted below):
Gijs wrote in Thu Feb 12, 2015 10:37 pm:I'd suggest you to bring this up on the devel mailing list. The move to SVN has been discussed in great lengths, switching back to Git is not something you can or should decide on your own. That's currently only adding more confusion to people wanting to submit their work to the project
Well. It is definetely something that a facet of developers are commited to avoid. At all cost. They have decided unilaterally an SVN move, and they will deffend it without even the need of focusing on the technical aspects of it.
As they have made their own decision, I thing it is morally appropriate for me to make my own decision, and offer the community a modular approach to fetch FGDATA with those aircrafts each want to initialize. Apparently no-one here is really interested in reaching a real broad consensus.
Anyone of the developers that want to have commit access and ownership of my git fork only need to contact me with express of their interest.
With that in mind, the FGDATA submodular approach has passed really nicely the technical test required to be considered feasible. There are not a current limit on submodules allowed by git, and they can be initialized and deinitialized comfortably. Tandem modification of aircrafts is also technically feasible and not more complex than doing a similar operation in other contexts. Finally, changes and improvements made to aircraft in SVN addon repository can be readily rebased and made available to the submodular FGDATA without risking its integrity. History needs not to be "lineal" in git repositories.
The FGDATA without aircraft will be offered soon by the core developers, and soon afterwards I will clone a fork, for the official FGDATA submodular repository. This important last step is still pending the developers to offer their official Aircraft less repository.
So in summary, I think having a fork of FGDATA that still contains aircraft as submodules is something that can be done, and in my opinion should be done.
And I found ethically and morally appropriate to invite any aircraft developer that finds the actions of the certain facet of core developers morally or technically unsound to consider submitting their improvement to the FGMEMBERS hosted aircraft. That off course is an invitation extended to everyone, including yourself, @GIJS.
I understand that aircraft development is an important part of Fligthgear development, but not one that cannot withstand forking, as it is appropriate to fork any opensource project.
Each user in the future will simply have the option to both fetch and develop their aircraft with the SVN, or using an FGDATA that includes these and other improvements from the submodular fork.
Please, do not doubt to address me with any concern or question you may have on this respect,
Duefully yours,
IHCOL
If we gave everybody in the World free software today, but we failed to teach them about the four freedoms, five years from now, would they still have it? Probably not, because if they don’t recognise their freedoms, they’ll let their freedoms fall