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FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby chris_blues » Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:03 am

Damn, I hoped you were slower.!

I deleted my post, because I think I've gone too far. So, please accept my apologies, and take this as an emotional outburst from the "other side"...

But on the other hand, this was entitled as my point of view. So please take it as such!

It still confuses me, why you call my post whining, while yours isn't a bit better! (my little point of view)
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Jabberwocky » Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:14 am

Hi Chris_Blue,

So ... you basically deny yourself to load planes from FGMEMBERS because you decided to be a political follower and for no other reason?

Because

- opposite to FGADDON, we have in FGMEMBERS a community attempt in Aircraft development. Means faster and because more eyes look at it often also a safer way to develop.

- the open source philosophy that everybody can contribute is supported via FGMEMBERS but surely not via any construct that basically just provides gatekeeping powers to a few in the community.

- Actually, it is FGADDON that has to pull the latest aircrafts from FGMEMBERS because FGADDON is the "repository" that limbs behind in Aircraft development.

So you say, FGMEMBERS doesn't give anything to FG ... well, like all political followers you obviously put ideology over reality here. FGMEMBERS actively supports the biggest multiplayer events in FG by providing an easy to use way to get all involved aircraft. FGMEMBERS helped by the promotion of community development, to provide more and often better planes for those events (and also for the just for fun flights). FGMEMBERS has also more and more become a place for those who are new to tinkering with planes because that is the place, they actually got help finding their way in. The other leg of this process is this very forum. Both together finally deliver an easier way for newcomers who want to contribute. So actually, FGMEMBERS did a lot for the FG community.
Now, lets see, what FGADDON gave us. A getekeeper, making sure only aircraft with the right amount of political correctness will be entered. Of course, that concept went broke after there was suddenly that hated free platform. What else gave us FGADDON? Oh yes, the loss of aircraft development history. That was a great one, don't you think? And it gave us back the single developer in basements who can jealously watch over his "ownership rights". Well, whatever that is, it is for sure neither an open source nor a GPL concept.

So despite your political motivated tirade, Chris, reality speaks another language than your ideologically motivated fairy tales. Unfortunately for you, a lot of people in the community (yes, the people you implicitly claimed to speak for) went down the reality road.

J.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby chris_blues » Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:18 am

:) whatever made you hit me... (again)
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Jabberwocky » Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:25 am

As you wrote in your signature: Don't hesitate. The gentle part is a little hard though if there are only baseless and wrongful accusations in your post. However, the thing, that makes me wonder is, how can a discussion about two technical tools become reason for an "emotional outbreak". Doesn't that show already, that from your side things are involved that have no place in any discussion about technical issues. Not that I wouldn't be aware that others aside of your suffer from occasional outbreaks of that kind. But see, when technical issues becomes ideology and therefore the base for open hate attacks, it happens usually because there is a minority who feels on the losing path and leashes out. That's something we can learn from human history. Just food for thought.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby KL-666 » Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:28 am

Come on people, try not to repeat the same arguments over and over again. Look for common grounds, if it is only for a half year or so. Then be companions or hit each other again, but with new arguments.

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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Jabberwocky » Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:35 am

Hi Vincent,

you know, what your problem is? You are a too reasonable person for this mess! You just look at things and judge them by what they do or don't. But this thing has obviously become a psychological matter over the time and that means, it is in many aspects reason free ... like politics, religion, ideology and other flying green spaghetti monsters. True believers will always jump out of the underwood and repeat the same sometimes millennia old lines again and again. That makes one think, it is best to ingore those sudden ambushes out of the underwood, but, as history shows, that gives the haters the feeling to have achieved something and makes them usually even more annoying because then the frequency of ambushes increases. So while the technical and reasonable issues are discussed more than once, the real problem hidden behind this games of fog and mirrors remains.

J.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby chris_blues » Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:36 am

:)
Don't hesitate to let me know if I'm incorrect or just annoying! As long as you do it gently! :)
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Lydiot » Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:37 am

chris_blues wrote in Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:03 am:Damn, I hoped you were slower.!


I'm faster than a speeding mullet.

chris_blues wrote in Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:03 am:I deleted my post, because I think I've gone too far. So, please accept my apologies, and take this as an emotional outburst from the "other side"...

But on the other hand, this was entitled as my point of view. So please take it as such!

It still confuses me, why you call my post whining, while yours isn't a bit better! (my little point of view)


No apologies are necessary. Yeah, I whined about whining, because it's frustrating to open a thread to try to learn something only to see that which I quoted which is now appropriately deleted (both your and my posts).

Now, on-topic: being an end user, I honestly don't see a huge problem here, more of a nuisance. Before I saw some airplanes in the official repo, and for the rest I had to find a thread which hopefully had a link to someone's hopefully still operational website (hangar) and download there. That was annoying. Now we have two options it seems, and perhaps that's annoying too. But if it's true in fact that what is in one place exists in the other (but not vice versa) then the latter place suffices, by definition, to find all that is needed. Again there may be hangars outside which is then no difference to before.

Also from an end user perspective one can have the opinion that now there are apparently two ways of doing this and if one wins out that's that. Hopefully it'll be the better one. The majority will in a sense decide. To me that seems completely in line with an open-source community based project. Perhaps I just have to go back and research this more to understand the objections that are technical and practical and possibly logical in nature. Maybe I missed something. But the one thing an (this) end user most certainly couldn't care less about is the politics behind the scene. I care about good people getting an opportunity to contribute to the project so that it grows and gets better. As you point out "ego" is just something that gets in the way, but that goes two ways unfortunately (and that wasn't aimed at you specifically).
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby chris_blues » Tue Sep 08, 2015 1:06 am

Thanks Lydiot, for coping with me! Feels good to have a conversation at eye-level.

I don't know, how to put this, without causing yet another flame war, especially here on the front lines (meaning this thread). Lets see...
I agree with you, in the end it's just an inconvenience for the end-user. On the other hand it's a loss for FG itself.

Funny, how a year (didn't look it up, might be more, might be less) wasn't enough, to ease things. Didn't we all come here, because we liked FG? Why is there (here) a frontline, and why am I being shot at, because I state my opinion? And being accused of being sth like a religous fanatic? This last one is interpreted from some posts above...

And again, I agree, it has become tiresome, to argue the same things over and over. To be honest, I wasn't aware, that this war has been going on for so long, I presumed it was gone by now. I mean the war itself...
Guess I wasn't paying too much attention to the forums these days, you know RL has this bad habit of getting in the way...

Lets all put some flowers in each others hair, take us by the hands and work together for the common cause! Peace!



...still not getting very neutral, but I'm working on it...
Give peace a chance!
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Jabberwocky » Tue Sep 08, 2015 1:17 am

Errr ... can you just clarify it for me?

- how is having a choice a bad thing for end users? Especially if said choice provides with the newest plane developments which are usually not or only weeks later in the "official" repository and obviously rarely to never on the website?

- how is free open source development on a community level a problem in a free open source project? Open source projects are sometimes, with critical parts, forced to implement a gatekeeper principle, I will admit to that, but I don't see this for our aircraft because since FGMEMBERS each and every one of them can be forked single without endangering the whole repository. So how can this be a bad thing?
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby chris_blues » Tue Sep 08, 2015 1:25 am

What do you want me to say? Do you really want to open the old fire-pits and discussions we all have had several times over and over again?

Just let me old heretic die and go to hell afterwards, and you die as a martyr and go to heaven. Deal?
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Jabberwocky » Tue Sep 08, 2015 1:37 am

No deal. I found the idea to bubble out lines in the style "it is as I say and you have to shut up to keep the peace" always a little annoying. So you claimed, it was a bad thing for the end user, now tell me why it is in your opinion a bad thing for the end user or admit, it was nothing but another little propaganda trick. You opened the fire hole, now either you defend what you did or admit you just tried to play perception.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby chris_blues » Tue Sep 08, 2015 2:00 am

Yet again in the line of fire... :( (Did you even listen to the song?)

If I tell you, why I think it's not good, you have to promise you won't shoot me afterwards (again) for my statement of opinion!

I think it's not good, not only for the end-user but for all of FG because
  • the dev-power got divided
  • as far as I can see, there is no intention to merge the progress back to FG. fgmembers is all input, no output. by design. Of course, the enduser can get it all, but what about flightgear.org? What is in it for the project?
  • there is a hole in the communtiy, which wasn't there before

Now you can call me emotional, or whatever you want (as long as you don't shoot me), but I believe, this is a major problem in the environment of the community. And this has not so much to do with technical issues, but with human issues.

The most problematic issue I see, is the part of merging back (or not). If I go, download all planes ever made under a free license for FSX, put them in a repo and declare that this is from now on the official repo of FSX, and invite all developers to contribute to my new official repo - I wonder what would happen next...
Funny, how things seem so clear to me, changing only a word, and yet, others don't seem to see it... at least, that's my feeling... (and that's no attack! I'd call it an observation. I don't mean to say, someone is slow, or stupid or sth. It's just funny, how perception is a very subjective matter!)

To end this one, (and I wanted to do this for a while, but it never came this point) I'd like to thank Israel, for raising hard questions last year (or so) on the devel-list. Really! Those were hard questions, and we all had our hands full to find some good answers. In the process, quite a bit changed! I hope he had the time to see those changes, looking at this warzone, I get my doubts, but hope dies last!

Peace!

...and no one throws a stone, until I say so!

...Jehova! Jehova!


(sorry, couldn't resist!)
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby KL-666 » Tue Sep 08, 2015 2:34 am

As said earlier, i am an outsider. I see two repositories of which each members want the other repository to stop exist. I see neither of the two repositories stop existing any time soon, no matter how much there is argued that the one is better than the other. So it might just be best to look for ways to make these two work together for the better of the whole fg community. Just as an experiment for a period of time. Then evaluate whether it works out well or not.

An idea what might work, others may have better knowledge and ideas about this.

Fgmembers is a big repository with almost all the aircraft ever worked on, including fgaddon. Working there is very open, so there is no quality control.

Fgaddon is technically speaking a subset of fgmembers, where the people try to maintain quality by being very controlling.

For fgaddon some work in fgmembers is below par, and other work they might have liked being developed in their own repository. Now they fear that that work can get lost some day. But the work fgaddon approves of can be made save by importing it from fgmembers. It may not be the most convenient way to work, nor immediately obvious how it could be done. But if one really wants, there is a way.

At evaluation it can come out that this importing works fine, or that there are too many conflicts to be a workable method. But please do not say beforehand that something is not going to work, or that you just dislike it, but try it first.

And who knows, after working together a while everyone gets convinced that the repositories should be merged, without any argument.

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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Lydiot » Tue Sep 08, 2015 4:31 am

chris_blues wrote in Tue Sep 08, 2015 2:00 am:Yet again in the line of fire... :( (Did you even listen to the song?)

If I tell you, why I think it's not good, you have to promise you won't shoot me afterwards (again) for my statement of opinion!

I think it's not good, not only for the end-user but for all of FG because
  • the dev-power got divided
  • as far as I can see, there is no intention to merge the progress back to FG. fgmembers is all input, no output. by design. Of course, the enduser can get it all, but what about flightgear.org? What is in it for the project?
  • there is a hole in the communtiy, which wasn't there before


Ok, well, as an end-user I don't understand why the first point is a problem. Either developers want to work together or they don't. If they did, and if they could, then this would never have happened. The fact that they (as far as I understand) work separately doesn't seem to matter then, logically speaking. But it's also my impression that an argument was that it was harder to get improvements through the official FG repo because of its more stringent demands on quality (?). So if that's the case then despite the "dev-power" being divided it seems to be bigger as a whole, at least potentially, and quality aside.

Regarding the second point I again don't quite understand the problem. If I can download a plane from FGmembers, why can't someone from the official do the same and "merge it back"? Surely there is some amount of work required by someone regardless of whether it's one or two repos operating, so what is the specific additional workload to get this done? And why are you separating this from FG? As - again - an end user, the only interest I have in FGmembers is getting planes downloaded for FG. Is this not the case for most visitors? What else is its purpose and what risk can it pose to FG - especially considering that anyone, you included, can just download it all and put it on a drive for later as a backup....???

The last point, "a hole in the community".... I don't know.... it seems to me that there's a lot of emotion involved in this and I honestly don't quite understand it. I'd understand if something technically speaking was inferior and people simply didn't comprehend that.... then I'd understand frustration. But being emotionally invested in something that is open source I absolutely don't get. I come from a collaboration background (music & media) and while I understand the sense of emotional involvement and investment and "ownership" when it comes to collaboration one has to just 'give'. It's not about any one individual but about the collective as a whole. And as I said, as an end-user I'm curious as to what the real problems are.... the ones you talk about simply don't really resonate for me......

I'm not sure this is related, but I find it frustrating that some airplane developers basically dissuade input or development on their "babies" because.... well, it's "their babies".... and they'll fix and develop real soon.... then it's like 18 months later and not much has happened...!?!? So does one favor more development over the other just in general, quality aside? That was my impression (which could certainly be wrong).

chris_blues wrote in Tue Sep 08, 2015 2:00 am:The most problematic issue I see, is the part of merging back (or not). If I go, download all planes ever made under a free license for FSX, put them in a repo and declare that this is from now on the official repo of FSX, and invite all developers to contribute to my new official repo - I wonder what would happen next...


I would assume judging from the above that FSX would be an example of what could go wrong. I have personally not seen anyone claim FGmembers is the "official repo", but maybe that's the case. To me it's just a bit odd. If I go up on this website and click on the "Aircraft" link, do I get the old or the new "official repo"? Because to me that seems to be the "official" one. But be that as it may, if this is a collaboration and open source, how can one really determine what's official in the first place? Is it by majority vote? Or is it done by a subset of developers, the "core"? How does one get into that "core"? How can it change? To what degree is it "open-source" and "open" relative to the ease with which that "core" can change?

Mind you, I'm not questioning the current status, I'm merely asking questions because I'm trying to understand the criticism.
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