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FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Thorsten » Tue Sep 08, 2015 6:06 am

It is not that complex of a concept. but well... I can't make Thorsten understand it. (prob. Personal limitations, and a surprising need of his to engage in personal conflict -- as oppose to rationalize ideas while respecting the other)


Ah well, funny that you would talk of rationalizing ideas while respecting the other after having been disruptive to the point that free speech advocates restricted your access to the mailing list. Funny that you would talk about my personal limitations in a paragraph where you advocate the idea of respecting the other.

Thing is, I'm not that stupid. I've seen the rough talk from your side, now it's sweet talk from your side since the rough version didn't get you what you wanted. What I have not seen is any sign that you actually regret having insulted basically everyone (you have apologized to Curt, but definitely not to me for instance), that you genuinely want co-operation other than people do as you think best or that you could accept decisions that go not your way.

I think I understand your concepts all too well unfortunately.

I see two repositories of which each members want the other repository to stop exist


No, actually not. I want them to do the fair thing and move all their discussions and other infrastructure to their own forum. That's all. Using all the goodies of the official FG infrastructure but not playing with the team when decisions are made is parasitic, and I object to that.

So it might just be best to look for ways to make these two work together for the better of the whole fg community.


You mean it is a reasonable paradigm that we just give up on the idea that a decision reached by the project after a year and more of discussion means anything and everyone does as he personally prefers afterwards? Really?

Because that's at the core of the issue. We're a team. We've had a year of discussion at least how to re-structure repositories. We learned we would never be able to make everyone happy, so after pages and pages of arguments a viable consensus was found. I (and several others) have pointed out how a sub-optimal consensus is still better than duplicating critical infrastructure for the project, so we need to keep it together.

Yet some folks decided to have their will anyway, no matter the consequences for the community, and opted for insulting a good part of the devel team in the process. With the result you can see.

I understand the desire of community members to stop the fight. But there was due process - a long discussion, a consensus in the end, a decision made. Most of the FG developers participating in the discussion never post in the forum - the perception of a forum user how the numbers stand on the issue is hence very skewed, but there is broad support for the decision in the devel community for FGAddon. More than a year of arguments exchanged is quite enough. The fair thing is eventually to stick with the decision, not to meet those who can't play with the team halfway.

I won't go into the technical discussion of GIT vs. SVN - personally I am a GIT advocate, there have been very good arguments for SVN as well (for instance, I don't know what 'monolithic' means in a version control system in which I can check out individual subdirectories and do maintenance only on them). I can live with both.

I will say that claims to 'censorship' and 'gatekeeping tyranny' have been vastly overblown - the most popularized incident was a technical thing about consistent repository history structure, not related to the content of the commit at all. I will also say that events have shown that the amount of gatekeeping exercised on FGAddon is needed since I've had no trouble observing how FGMEMBERS shipped a mutilated version of my own work, and there have been several instances where third party hangar planes on FGMEMBERS refered to old and obsolete planes. So version control and general maintenance in response to core changes are reasonable concepts, to be discarded at your peril.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Lydiot » Tue Sep 08, 2015 6:40 am

Thorsten wrote in Tue Sep 08, 2015 6:06 am:
It is not that complex of a concept. but well... I can't make Thorsten understand it. (prob. Personal limitations, and a surprising need of his to engage in personal conflict -- as oppose to rationalize ideas while respecting the other)


Ah well, funny that you would talk


Who are you talking to?
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Thorsten » Tue Sep 08, 2015 7:25 am

To the person who said the quoted phrase - why?
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Thorsten » Tue Sep 08, 2015 10:19 am

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.


After reflection, I think the picture you point of FGAddon approving off is rather off the mark.

The quality control is chiefly technical - is the commit as such sound or screwing repository history? Does the version run with current FG or does it refer to / require an obsolete version?

In the case there is an existing version of an aircraft and a maintainer, usually a consensus with the maintainer is the desired goal. The ideal outcome is to get one excellent airplane rather than two modest variants. So in this case, there may be discussions along whether something is an improvement and can replace something existing, or whether it is an alternative solution and should exist alternatively, or whether it doesn't really improve anything existing.

Work cycles that the actual development happens outside fgdata/FGAddon and stable versions are periodically pushed there have been in place long ago, continue to exist and have been used by many people (including several core developers and myself). Nothing new here, nothing that needs to be talked about.

If the FGMEMBERS proponents would be actually interested in co-operation, it would be easy to do. Do like other repositories and make periodical updates of the stable version to FGAddon. De-list all material that's brought to their attention as not GPL licensed from the GPL part. Right now, the idea seems to be to wait till it goes via GitHub and then give another speech about censorship. Respect contributors wishes to opt out from FGMEMBERS and rely on voluntary participation. And apologize to all people who have been insulted in the past. And recognize that you can either be part of a team, then you have to respect the decisions made by the team, or you can do things as you want, then you're no longer part of the team.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby KL-666 » Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:29 pm

Hello Thorsten,

It may be easy for me to say in this case, but i do not look at what is fair. I look at the current situation and how to move forward from there. You may call me an over optimist, but it works the same in my personal life. If i loose my little wealth for some very unfair reason, i inventorize the new situation and move forward from there. Were i to think all the time of the fairness, then i might want to kill myself. And that is not my style.

Here i see an opening for moving forward.

If the FGMEMBERS proponents would be actually interested in co-operation, it would be easy to do. Do like other repositories and make periodical updates of the stable version to FGAddon.


I suggested pull, but push can be good as well. To make this work one only needs to look at the requirements. I see two.

1) What is there to gain for the developer? There must be something, if only it were to get his aircraft on the main download page.

2) Willingness to update. In the current rather hostile environment there might not be much willingness (actually unwillingness). But if the situation normalizes a bit, then there might be more willingness than expected now. If a developer "forgets" to update fgaddon and someone asks him to do so, he might just do it immediately. Maybe we'll even find Israel running after the fgmembers developers, urging them to update fgaddon :-).

Kind regards, Vincent
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History of the FGData/FGAddon split - repeating the past.

Postby bugman » Tue Sep 08, 2015 2:57 pm

I think that a little walk down history lane will give a bit of context and help understand the perspective of the long-standing FlightGear code and content developers. Firstly, here is the birth of FGMEMBERS:


Reading the first thread clearly shows a knee-jerk reaction to not knowing about the split, after the FGData/FGAddon split was finalised. Now, the idea of the FGData split into fgdata-new and flightgear-aircraft (a.k.a. FGAddon) is old, very old. An important history lesson can be learnt from this abortive 1st attempt:


The splitting discussions significantly pre-date this, and then followed it until the final agreed upon solution of FGAddon was created. Also see the wiki article:


Going back in time in this wiki article to Revision as of 19:14, 16 November 2011 by Durk:

To Split or not to Split, that's the question
After much discussion on the mailing list, it was decided to put the existing attempt to split FGdata on hold until further notice. The main reason for postponing the split was that, while it was considered a well intended initiative, the end result of the splitting process itself left the FlightGear fgdata project in a less than desirable state. For this reason, before another splitting attempt is to be undertaken, the pro's and con's of each step should be carefully evaluated. This article discusses some of our options and will formulate a plan of approach that can be presented to -and discussed in further depth- on the developers mailing list. Several reasons have been put forth to split fgdata:


To say that the FGAddon concept is not well thought out, to also fight the FG developers ("I invite you all to join the resistance :D", "And maybe everyonce certain time it may be possible to update the modular repo with changes that stubbornly end up in the wrong place (a.k.a SVN fgaddon)", etc.), and, from first hand accounts that I've heard, the intense personal and private attacks on almost all of the core FG developers once it was realised that FGMEMBERS could not replace FGAddon - this is disrespectful to the FlightGear developers, past and present, who have spent almost half a decade debating and refining the current FGData/FGAddon design.

Note the almost identical set up between the Gitorious flightgear-aircraft design and the GitHub FGMEMBERS design - the splitting up individual aircraft into individual repositories, loss of central control, the git submodule idea (as first proposed by James Turner), etc. The original wiki page by Gijs is interesting:


Note that Cedric was not a FG developer, in that he has no commits in the core repositories, but was helped by Gijs and Jorg. Also relevant to FGMEMBERS design of handing the keys to all interested developers would be this from Gijs:

On 18.10.2011 19:46:58 GMT, Gijs de Rooy wrote:My "plan" is still to keep the aircraft under the FlightGear Aircraft project, as written down on the
wiki page http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_G ... ing_fgdata I did not add 387 repositories
to Gitorious (by hand!) to see them dissolve ;)

After a simple test I found out that granting admin rights to aircraft authors will also mean that they
can revoke the flightgear-aircraft team's rights. And if that is done, we'd have no control over the
repo whatsoever. We even would be unable to delete it (only way is to delete the entire project, but
as you can imagine that isn't "a way").

I've added this to the "Questions" section at the wiki. Please see if you can answer/ask any other
questions/concerns: http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_G ... #Questions

Therefore I think we shouldn't give aircraft authors full admin rights over their aircraft's repos. I did
add all fgdata-developers and flightgear-developers to the flightgear-aircraft team, so anyone that
was able to push to fgdata/flightgear should be able to push to all aircraft repos. Please let me know
when you're missing.


If you read the whole archived thread [Flightgear-devel] FGData Split Completed - a.k.a. Life after the Split and the following [Flightgear-devel] fgdata: Important note, which will take time, you'll see a mirror image of the current discussions! Even Thorsten's arguments are the same. Simply replace Gitorious with GitHub, flightgear-aircraft with FGMEMBERS, and Cedric with Israel and these 2011 mailing list threads could very well be these 2015 forum threads. The development concept behind Gitorious flightgear-aircraft and GitHub FGMEMBERS are both based on the principle of anarchy to facilitate development, removing barriers of entry, and the arguments for this design are identical. I'm starting to wonder if Cedric and Israel are not one and the same person ;)

I would like to quote an old FG developer who is no longer around - Thorsten. Not Thorsten Renk, but rather Thorsten Brehmt. The arguments he presents about "[disolving] our central community aircraft repository" fit quiet well to the argument against the FGMEMBERS anarchic model with no central control, and its stated and undisputed goal of replacing FGAddon:

On 18.10.2011 19:03:47 GMT, ThorstenB wrote:A community repo has a lot of advantages. When people leave, work isn't
lost - maintenance kind of automatically "transfers" to the community.
When really necessary, we can also apply patches - i.e. when something
about the flight sim itself has to be changed and aircraft really need
to be adapted (which we usually try to avoid, of course).
A central repo also allowed us to use the bug tracker for aircraft
issues. No one is going to work the bug tracker for issues which affect
aircraft living in some dodgy private hangar, probably in 8 different
versions maintained by 3 different authors - and we're going to see
loads of aircraft forks, without an "official" repo.

We'd also be seeing fewer GPLed aircraft. So far, we had the strict
rule: only GPLed stuff was accepted - which was very good for the
project. Without such a central hangar, there is one reason less for
GPL. And when the majority of aircraft wasn't GPLed any longer,
FlightGear will be much less attractive. And why should someone work on
_GPLed_ FG core sources - if the rest isn't?

The aircraft in our main repository are worth a lot. It's been there for
many, many years and it took many, many hours to create. The aircraft
probably account for far more than 50% of the time spent on creating
FlightGear. It'd be extremely unfortunate to drop all this from the FG
community project. And only being slightly provocative: if splitting
FGDATA now turns toward a path of "breaking up" our FG aircraft - I'll
rather propose to keep the existing FGDATA.

So, before any such major decision affecting the community is made here,
I would really like everyone's opinion. Especially Curt's...


So let me just repeat something I've mentioned a number of times, mainly in private messages. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it! And repetition this sure is!

Regards,

Edward


P. S. Actually, maybe this topic would be better split out into a new thread "History of the FGData/FGAddon split - repeating the past"?
Last edited by bugman on Tue Sep 08, 2015 4:56 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Thorsten » Tue Sep 08, 2015 3:12 pm

It may be easy for me to say in this case, but i do not look at what is fair. I look at the current situation and how to move forward from there.


Well, I don't - I'm interested in long-term stability of the project, and that is achieved by doing what is fair, i.e. respecting a decision reached after a long discussion. You can of course do what you like, but don't expect me to play along.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby KL-666 » Tue Sep 08, 2015 3:16 pm

Hello Thorsten,

Fair enough. I just want to say that what i am proposing is also meant to get back at a long-term stability of the project.

Kind regards, Vincent
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Thorsten » Tue Sep 08, 2015 3:26 pm

I think you're confusing the project (where FGMEMBERS doesn't factor at all into decisions and is regarded as a fork) with the forum (where things have much deteriorated).
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Lydiot » Tue Sep 08, 2015 4:21 pm

Thorsten wrote in Tue Sep 08, 2015 7:25 am:To the person who said the quoted phrase - why?


Well can you please just put the person's name in the quote then so we don't have to go searching for the text to understand with whom you are talking? When you press "quote" it'll do it automatically for you even.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Jabberwocky » Tue Sep 08, 2015 5:56 pm

Chris,

lets go into the concrete points:

- nothing can go back from FGMEMBERS into FGADDON because in FGADDON sits a small bunch of gatekeepers who let nothing in. To provide them with data, meta-data, whatever they need would be one of the easiest exercises, but well, the hard part is to provide them with the will to take what FGMEMBERS offers. In so far, you do the same as those wannabe gatekeepers and thus become part of the problem.

- The license-lie. See, some and especially one certain person yells all the time about "license" and how bad FGMEMBERS is. But if you look for example at the 787, you find, that FGADDON includes only one old 787 of a provenience that is unknown at best. If what said wannabe-gatekeeper license-lied, this is a GPL from Omega ... too bad, that the original is creative commons. So ... well, what now? Aside of the obvious violation of license right in FGADDON, AND NOT in FGMEMBERS, all FGADDON made sure in this case is, that everybody finds an outdated version in the "official" repository. The 787 is still maintained in FGMEMBERS though. But since FGADDON refuses to pull from FGMEMBERS, ... guess what?

- The whole thing with dev-resources split ... in FGMEMBERS we have in projects like the 727 half a dozen people working on one plane. Some livery artists, now two FDM guys, and as it looks, we get also two cockpit guys. IAHM-COL works his way in 3d, so we have that in the team as well. FGMEMBERS bundles dev-resources.
Now, that is not so bad as it sounds for FGADDON because FGADDON is anyway the last line of defense of the "ownership rights" philosophers. Nobody there works with anybody else or wants to work with anybody else and, so my impression, the last people welcome at FGADDON are those nasty pain in the rears who improve all the time aircraft in teams. So, since FGADDON is an island and increasingly a remote one, and wants to be exactly that, no harm is done. Who cares about remote islands anyway? However, to argue, that everything that doesn't exist on your remote island shouldn't exist at all ... well, yeah, we had that in human history too often. Usually not with virtual aircraft but with people though.

- and then there is this infamous FSX question. Honestly, if I would stuck in your shoes and had to defend a lost cause like FGADDON, I would have avoided that part. Why? See, there are two scenarios since FSX is a Microsoft product. So Microsoft would come to the idea they want to build up an official repository. Now, there is actually such a thing, you can load a number of aircraft from them. But not even Microsoft ever tried to be the one and only source for aircraft for FSX. They know, opposite to our wannabe-gatekeepers, that this is not possible. Every time, you deliver an old, outdated or just less developed aircraft, someone goes and makes a better one and offers it somehow, via a website, via a repository or even as package product.
But now imagine, Microsoft's janitor, someone officially belonging to the project but being far from official decides to build a quite buggy repository, maybe together with the cleaning women and that guy from book keeping and he claims "this is now the one and only official repository and bow to my power".
People will roll on the floor laughing and the more the janitor drooling and spitting makes his empty claims, the more they will stop to laugh and get their work done without even thinking too much about the janitor and the cleaning women and the guy from book keeping. That is what will happen. Of course, if the janitor decide to stick a big Microsoft logo on his remote island, Microsoft's legal department would explain to him that not every janitor can pop up and claim to be "official". They would explain it to him probably in a rather expensive and painful way.

So, you obviously suffer from the misconception, that something that claims to be "official" has really to be official. Which is still quite a stretch since there isn't even an "official" project organization in form of a legal entity. The second mistake is to assume "official" means "legally correct" (as the problem with the 787 shows) or "up to date" (take your pick which of the about 100 outdated planes from FGADDON you like as example) or "complete" (just compare the numbers). But well, man's beliefs are his personal heaven. So feel free to fly outdated planes or whatever you want there, that is your choice. The moment, you come out and try to spread wrongful information to the disadvantage of end users and newcomers, you are in the line of fire because that is where you intentionally parked your rear.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Thorsten » Tue Sep 08, 2015 6:07 pm

Well can you please just put the person's name in the quote then so we don't have to go searching for the text to understand with whom you are talking?


This is quite a de-tour, but if you absolutely must know - the answer is no. I have established ten year old habits of typing forum posts without ever using buttons and typing tags, the forum guidelines actually say that quoting by name is optional, and I don't see the issue as so relevant that I would really bother changing my habits.

First, I'm usually responding to a point, not to a person. It doesn't matter for the validity of the argument who made it. Second, it's an illusion that hyperlinks improve understanding - they do the opposite, there's enough neuroscience on that by now. You get the whole flow of the argument by reading it from beginning to end, not by following hyperlinks. And third, I don't see why in the few cases somebody actually thinks it's important to find who said something he can't be bothered to use a search function. Google will find the quoted text in a fraction of a second. So perhaps it's important to you, I acknowledge that, but it isn't to me, and not everything that's important to you personally translates into a desirable forum rule.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Jabberwocky » Tue Sep 08, 2015 6:16 pm

Translated: Thorsten gave himself the permission to spread insults without clear addressee nor source for his claims. I think, this is NOT a desirable forum rule.
And a moderator can maybe take a look what happened to all those posts referring to Thorsten's wrongful accusations. They have a weird tendency to be eaten by the forum.
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Thorsten » Tue Sep 08, 2015 6:20 pm

- nothing can go back from FGMEMBERS into FGADDON because in FGADDON sits a small bunch of gatekeepers who let nothing in.


Hm. So far nobody has tried. So that's apparently 'propaganda', as you're so fond of saying.

- The license-lie. See, some and especially one certain person yells all the time about "license" and how bad FGMEMBERS is.


I guess that has been explained at nauseam, and we had our taste of your comprehension of license issues when you claimed that Free Software Foundation lawyers argued that you couldn't make money of GPL software. So there's clearly one person here who doesn't understand GPL - and that's you.

- The whole thing with dev-resources split ...


...is apparently something you never understood, because the examples make no sense at all. We've all known that devel teams have existed all the time outside the official repository as I said above. Oh, just read up the argument, I'm tired of repeating it.

So, you obviously suffer from the misconception, that something that claims to be "official" has really to be official.


You're apparently suffering from the misconception that simply wishing for something to be official makes it so. I think you'll have a hard time convincing anyone else but your buddies that you represent the FG project.

But well, man's beliefs are his personal heaven.


Quite so, as you so astutely demonstrate.

The moment, you come out and try to spread wrongful information to the disadvantage of end users and newcomers, you are in the line of fire because that is where you intentionally parked your rear.


Ah, but see, this forum is official infrastructure. Which you of course don't recognize, but which means you can't behave as you want and continue to spread your 'propaganda' and attack people based on things which never happened - you'll be held to the facts and to certain standards of civilized conduct (which precludes baseless accusations) or else you'll find yourself moderated away.

Which is to say - empty threat. :-)
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Re: FGAddon vs. FGMEMBERS, bus factors etc.

Postby Jabberwocky » Tue Sep 08, 2015 6:24 pm

Thorsten,

just to clear this up: The 787 in FGADDON is under which license?
and a moderator can maybe answer the question why Thorsten is allowed to attack me while I get "forum warnings" when I defend my point? Does it have to do with Thorsten being Thorsten? So he isn't bound to civilized conduct?

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