haiku + suggestion

haiku + suggestion

[Drew M. Meeks]

You asked for a haiku, you got it.
...............
Sources and DevNet
To make tools and to use tools
two sides of one coin
...............

Ok so the haiku stinks, but the idea I think is a good one. We need to
make sourceware/sources closer connected to redhat.com and vice versa. I
began this conversation with Jim Kingdon before he left and I think the
time is right to resume it.

I believe that sources.redhat.com and the Developer Network serve
different audiences and have different objectives but that they should
ultimately be deeply connected, much as two sides of the same coin.

The Developer Network's objective is to attract Programmers/Developers
to Red Hat's development platforms: for example, corporate and
commercial developers currently using NT. It's intended audience is the
users/potential users of our OS, compilers, debuggers, etc. not the
actual developers of those tools.

Sources.redhat.com, on the other hand, is clearly targeted at the people
who develop the tools themselves: the GNU/open source development
community. It is a resource to foster the ongoing development of these
tools, more than to encourage their adoption.

Since the audiences and objectives are different, I think it makes sense
to maintain the DevNet as the developer/programmer customer facing area
on the site and Sources as the tool/OS Developer facing area and to
provide meaningful links between the two. This they become like two
sides to one coin. 

The other aspect of this idea is to unify the hw/sw infrastructure. Paul
Lindner is heading up the development of a robust and dynamic
infrastructure for redhat.com. There are many excellent features that
already exist or are under development that Sources could benefit from.
Unifying the infrastructure would also more easily enable other
development groups within Red Hat to publish and maintain their public
Engineering project sites as part of Sources.

I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter and to help us arrive
at the right answer.

thanks for your time,

Drew

-- 
..........................................
drew meeks...............sr. web architect
products and platforms.....red hat, inc...
........................415.777.9810.x.222

Re: haiku + suggestion

[Chris Faylor]

On Mon, Jul 10, 2000 at 12:43:58PM -0700, Drew M. Meeks wrote:
>You asked for a haiku, you got it.
>...............
>Sources and DevNet
>To make tools and to use tools
>two sides of one coin
>...............
>
>Ok so the haiku stinks, but the idea I think is a good one. We need to
>make sourceware/sources closer connected to redhat.com and vice versa. I
>began this conversation with Jim Kingdon before he left and I think the
>time is right to resume it.
>
>I believe that sources.redhat.com and the Developer Network serve
>different audiences and have different objectives but that they should
>ultimately be deeply connected, much as two sides of the same coin.
>
>The Developer Network's objective is to attract Programmers/Developers
>to Red Hat's development platforms: for example, corporate and
>commercial developers currently using NT. It's intended audience is the
>users/potential users of our OS, compilers, debuggers, etc. not the
>actual developers of those tools.
>
>Sources.redhat.com, on the other hand, is clearly targeted at the people
>who develop the tools themselves: the GNU/open source development
>community. It is a resource to foster the ongoing development of these
>tools, more than to encourage their adoption.

I don't know about the Developer's Network, but I don't think that the
distinction is not quite that sharp for sources.redhat.com.  This site
hosts a number of mailing lists.  I'm most familiar with the gdb and
cygwin mailing lists.  The gdb mailing list receives a fair amount of
traffic from people who are trying to use gdb and don't really care
about developing gdb itself.

The Cygwin mailing list is almost entirely comprised of people who
want to use Cygwin either as a comfortable UNIX environment for Windows
or as a free development toolkit.  Looking at some of the threads on the
Developer Network, I'm struck between the similarity between it and the
cygwin mailing list.  The posters don't care about developing cygwin at
all.  They just want something that works.

Both the gdb and cygwin users sound like they would be more closely
targeted by the Developer Network but I see problems with sending people
there 1) I'm not sure that the FSF would like us to be sending people
with questions to a forum that was obviously hosted by a commercial
Linux supplier, 2) I'm not sure that Red Hat would like to advertise the
existence of a Windows alternative to Linux, and 3) Every product on
sourceware (except Cygwin) can be hosted on and/or targeted for many
more platforms than just Red Hat Linux.

I'm not sure how you plan on addressing 3) on the Developer Network.
Red Hat provides products for much more than just Linux nowadays.  If
you truly want to address all of Red Hat's customers then there will
have to be a lot more options for other platforms won't there?

Also, remember that the sourceware CVS repository is used for almost all
of the development for things like gdb, gcc, binutils, and cygwin.
Changing this in any way will have ramifications.

>Since the audiences and objectives are different, I think it makes sense
>to maintain the DevNet as the developer/programmer customer facing area
>on the site and Sources as the tool/OS Developer facing area and to
>provide meaningful links between the two. This they become like two
>sides to one coin. 

I dunno.  I sort of view sources.redhat.com as equivalent to
sourceforge.net.  There is a link to VA Linux on the sourceforge.net
page but VA Linux is not prominently a part of the page.  There are no
links to other VA Linux services that I can see.

I kind of like keeping sources as vendor-neutral as possible.  It was
started as a way to help foster development of open source projects
(Jason Molenda, please correct me if I'm wrong).  We sort of thought
of it as giving back a little to the community while getting some
"feel good" PR in the process.

If we start adding even subtle Red Hat advertising to the page, I think
that it is possible that people will think twice about contributing.
I don't know this for sure, of course.

>The other aspect of this idea is to unify the hw/sw infrastructure. Paul
>Lindner is heading up the development of a robust and dynamic
>infrastructure for redhat.com. There are many excellent features that
>already exist or are under development that Sources could benefit from.
>Unifying the infrastructure would also more easily enable other
>development groups within Red Hat to publish and maintain their public
>Engineering project sites as part of Sources.

There are a number of things that could be done to sources to make it
more attractive to the community and to ease the burden of people who
are currently maintaining it.  Jeff Law, Tom Tromey, and I have been
talking about this a lot in the last week or so.  We hope to have
some written recommendations in a few weeks.

It will be interesting to see how this meshes with future plans.  I hope
that Paul will be soliciting input for his infrastructure improvements.

cgf

Re: haiku + suggestion

[Jim Kingdon]

First of all, welcome to the overseers list, Drew.  That you took the
initiative to show up here is a good sign.

I'll let Chris, Jeff, and Tom take the lead in terms of coming up with
a proposal or defining a strategy or that kind of thing.  But here's
my two cents as a non Red Hat employee who would kind of like to
remain at least somewhat involved in sources.redhat (as an aside, today
was my first day working for sourceforge.net - very interesting).

As for links between the Developer Network and sources.redhat, please
suggest specific links (diffs to the HTML is best) you think would
make sense.  There are a lot of parts of sources.redhat and I'm sure
there are places where a link to an informative resource relevant to
that page would be both helpful and appropriate (other parts, notably
gcc.gnu.org, need to be more paranoid on the "appropriate" front, and
I'm sure that pages like GDB or whatever have plenty of shades of
grey.  But it helps a lot if the link makes sense content-wise - like
the various links at the bottom of the GDB page to netwinder.org,
sourceforge, and other "commercial" sites).  Heck, if you start
submitting changes you are in danger of getting checkin access to the
sources.redhat pages :-).

I'll start the ball rolling on the "copy-editing/suggestion exchange"
by saying that http://www.redhat.com/devnet/tools/gdb/jindex.html has
a link to sourceware.cygnus.com which should be updated to
sources.redhat.com (well, I'd suggest a search-and-replace across
www.redhat which seems easier than trying to mention each of the ones
I stumbled across).  Similarly on
http://www.redhat.com/devnet/tools/gcj/maillist.html it should link to
gcc.gnu.org not gcc.cygnus.com.

As for infrastructure, certainly there are things we need.  More
bandwidth is the obvious one (not that this is a simple matter unless
more $$$ has suddenly appeared; we are currently maxxed out on our T1
and could probably consume roughly two T1's simply by raising the FTP
user limit).  One "creative solution" I'd like to mention (again) is
mirroring our FTP site on priority.redhat.com which I think would be a
win for all involved but I didn't get the idea that priority.redhat
really wanted to deal with that kind of traffic.  And I don't know
that people here have a particularly strong opinion about things like
hardware.  We're very concerned about reliability.  But I hope and
trust that you are too so perhaps that one could have gone without
saying.

Software infrastructure is another matter.  To give an example, and at
the risk of nit-picking or something like that, our mailing list
archives on sources.redhat are nicer than the ones on www.redhat.  And
sources.redhat delivers the mail on time (neither snow, nor sleet, nor
....).  As someone who has been on mailing lists which take hours to
deliver messages, believe me, having them delivered in less than a
minute (typically) changes the whole experience for the better.  If
unifying software infrastructure is a two way process in which those
of us who built sources.redhat get to help improve www.redhat, I think
there is a great possibility here to help out both sites.  But people
are going to be nervous about losing what we have on sources.redhat
(at least, I am nervous...).

So overall, let's try to focus on getting cool things done (I just
looked at the Developer Network for the first time in months and saw a
lot of great stuff there).  If we can keep our eyes on that goal, and
avoid putting up obstacles to winning, we should do fine.

Re: haiku + suggestion

[Jim Kingdon]

First of all, welcome to the overseers list, Drew.  That you took the
initiative to show up here is a good sign.

I'll let Chris, Jeff, and Tom take the lead in terms of coming up with
a proposal or defining a strategy or that kind of thing.  But here's
my two cents as a non Red Hat employee who would kind of like to
remain at least somewhat involved in sources.redhat (as an aside, today
was my first day working for sourceforge.net - very interesting).

As for links between the Developer Network and sources.redhat, please
suggest specific links (diffs to the HTML is best) you think would
make sense.  There are a lot of parts of sources.redhat and I'm sure
there are places where a link to an informative resource relevant to
that page would be both helpful and appropriate (other parts, notably
gcc.gnu.org, need to be more paranoid on the "appropriate" front, and
I'm sure that pages like GDB or whatever have plenty of shades of
grey.  But it helps a lot if the link makes sense content-wise - like
the various links at the bottom of the GDB page to netwinder.org,
sourceforge, and other "commercial" sites).  Heck, if you start
submitting changes you are in danger of getting checkin access to the
sources.redhat pages :-).

I'll start the ball rolling on the "copy-editing/suggestion exchange"
by saying that http://www.redhat.com/devnet/tools/gdb/jindex.html has
a link to sourceware.cygnus.com which should be updated to
sources.redhat.com (well, I'd suggest a search-and-replace across
www.redhat which seems easier than trying to mention each of the ones
I stumbled across).  Similarly on
http://www.redhat.com/devnet/tools/gcj/maillist.html it should link to
gcc.gnu.org not gcc.cygnus.com.

As for infrastructure, certainly there are things we need.  More
bandwidth is the obvious one (not that this is a simple matter unless
more $$$ has suddenly appeared; we are currently maxxed out on our T1
and could probably consume roughly two T1's simply by raising the FTP
user limit).  One "creative solution" I'd like to mention (again) is
mirroring our FTP site on priority.redhat.com which I think would be a
win for all involved but I didn't get the idea that priority.redhat
really wanted to deal with that kind of traffic.  And I don't know
that people here have a particularly strong opinion about things like
hardware.  We're very concerned about reliability.  But I hope and
trust that you are too so perhaps that one could have gone without
saying.

Software infrastructure is another matter.  To give an example, and at
the risk of nit-picking or something like that, our mailing list
archives on sources.redhat are nicer than the ones on www.redhat.  And
sources.redhat delivers the mail on time (neither snow, nor sleet, nor
....).  As someone who has been on mailing lists which take hours to
deliver messages, believe me, having them delivered in less than a
minute (typically) changes the whole experience for the better.  If
unifying software infrastructure is a two way process in which those
of us who built sources.redhat get to help improve www.redhat, I think
there is a great possibility here to help out both sites.  But people
are going to be nervous about losing what we have on sources.redhat
(at least, I am nervous...).

So overall, let's try to focus on getting cool things done (I just
looked at the Developer Network for the first time in months and saw a
lot of great stuff there).  If we can keep our eyes on that goal, and
avoid putting up obstacles to winning, we should do fine.

Re: haiku + suggestion

[Chris Faylor]

On Mon, Jul 10, 2000 at 12:43:58PM -0700, Drew M. Meeks wrote:
>You asked for a haiku, you got it.
>...............
>Sources and DevNet
>To make tools and to use tools
>two sides of one coin
>...............
>
>Ok so the haiku stinks, but the idea I think is a good one. We need to
>make sourceware/sources closer connected to redhat.com and vice versa. I
>began this conversation with Jim Kingdon before he left and I think the
>time is right to resume it.
>
>I believe that sources.redhat.com and the Developer Network serve
>different audiences and have different objectives but that they should
>ultimately be deeply connected, much as two sides of the same coin.
>
>The Developer Network's objective is to attract Programmers/Developers
>to Red Hat's development platforms: for example, corporate and
>commercial developers currently using NT. It's intended audience is the
>users/potential users of our OS, compilers, debuggers, etc. not the
>actual developers of those tools.
>
>Sources.redhat.com, on the other hand, is clearly targeted at the people
>who develop the tools themselves: the GNU/open source development
>community. It is a resource to foster the ongoing development of these
>tools, more than to encourage their adoption.

I don't know about the Developer's Network, but I don't think that the
distinction is not quite that sharp for sources.redhat.com.  This site
hosts a number of mailing lists.  I'm most familiar with the gdb and
cygwin mailing lists.  The gdb mailing list receives a fair amount of
traffic from people who are trying to use gdb and don't really care
about developing gdb itself.

The Cygwin mailing list is almost entirely comprised of people who
want to use Cygwin either as a comfortable UNIX environment for Windows
or as a free development toolkit.  Looking at some of the threads on the
Developer Network, I'm struck between the similarity between it and the
cygwin mailing list.  The posters don't care about developing cygwin at
all.  They just want something that works.

Both the gdb and cygwin users sound like they would be more closely
targeted by the Developer Network but I see problems with sending people
there 1) I'm not sure that the FSF would like us to be sending people
with questions to a forum that was obviously hosted by a commercial
Linux supplier, 2) I'm not sure that Red Hat would like to advertise the
existence of a Windows alternative to Linux, and 3) Every product on
sourceware (except Cygwin) can be hosted on and/or targeted for many
more platforms than just Red Hat Linux.

I'm not sure how you plan on addressing 3) on the Developer Network.
Red Hat provides products for much more than just Linux nowadays.  If
you truly want to address all of Red Hat's customers then there will
have to be a lot more options for other platforms won't there?

Also, remember that the sourceware CVS repository is used for almost all
of the development for things like gdb, gcc, binutils, and cygwin.
Changing this in any way will have ramifications.

>Since the audiences and objectives are different, I think it makes sense
>to maintain the DevNet as the developer/programmer customer facing area
>on the site and Sources as the tool/OS Developer facing area and to
>provide meaningful links between the two. This they become like two
>sides to one coin. 

I dunno.  I sort of view sources.redhat.com as equivalent to
sourceforge.net.  There is a link to VA Linux on the sourceforge.net
page but VA Linux is not prominently a part of the page.  There are no
links to other VA Linux services that I can see.

I kind of like keeping sources as vendor-neutral as possible.  It was
started as a way to help foster development of open source projects
(Jason Molenda, please correct me if I'm wrong).  We sort of thought
of it as giving back a little to the community while getting some
"feel good" PR in the process.

If we start adding even subtle Red Hat advertising to the page, I think
that it is possible that people will think twice about contributing.
I don't know this for sure, of course.

>The other aspect of this idea is to unify the hw/sw infrastructure. Paul
>Lindner is heading up the development of a robust and dynamic
>infrastructure for redhat.com. There are many excellent features that
>already exist or are under development that Sources could benefit from.
>Unifying the infrastructure would also more easily enable other
>development groups within Red Hat to publish and maintain their public
>Engineering project sites as part of Sources.

There are a number of things that could be done to sources to make it
more attractive to the community and to ease the burden of people who
are currently maintaining it.  Jeff Law, Tom Tromey, and I have been
talking about this a lot in the last week or so.  We hope to have
some written recommendations in a few weeks.

It will be interesting to see how this meshes with future plans.  I hope
that Paul will be soliciting input for his infrastructure improvements.

cgf

haiku + suggestion

[Drew M. Meeks]

You asked for a haiku, you got it.
...............
Sources and DevNet
To make tools and to use tools
two sides of one coin
...............

Ok so the haiku stinks, but the idea I think is a good one. We need to
make sourceware/sources closer connected to redhat.com and vice versa. I
began this conversation with Jim Kingdon before he left and I think the
time is right to resume it.

I believe that sources.redhat.com and the Developer Network serve
different audiences and have different objectives but that they should
ultimately be deeply connected, much as two sides of the same coin.

The Developer Network's objective is to attract Programmers/Developers
to Red Hat's development platforms: for example, corporate and
commercial developers currently using NT. It's intended audience is the
users/potential users of our OS, compilers, debuggers, etc. not the
actual developers of those tools.

Sources.redhat.com, on the other hand, is clearly targeted at the people
who develop the tools themselves: the GNU/open source development
community. It is a resource to foster the ongoing development of these
tools, more than to encourage their adoption.

Since the audiences and objectives are different, I think it makes sense
to maintain the DevNet as the developer/programmer customer facing area
on the site and Sources as the tool/OS Developer facing area and to
provide meaningful links between the two. This they become like two
sides to one coin. 

The other aspect of this idea is to unify the hw/sw infrastructure. Paul
Lindner is heading up the development of a robust and dynamic
infrastructure for redhat.com. There are many excellent features that
already exist or are under development that Sources could benefit from.
Unifying the infrastructure would also more easily enable other
development groups within Red Hat to publish and maintain their public
Engineering project sites as part of Sources.

I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter and to help us arrive
at the right answer.

thanks for your time,

Drew

-- 
..........................................
drew meeks...............sr. web architect
products and platforms.....red hat, inc...
........................415.777.9810.x.222