Re: [Tails-dev] [gsoc] tails-greeter report & meeting

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Autor: intrigeri
Datum:  
To: The Tails public development discussion list
Betreff: Re: [Tails-dev] [gsoc] tails-greeter report & meeting
Hi,

† wrote (03 Jun 2011 10:01:34 GMT) :
> Tomorrow meeting is scheduled as usual for tomorrow (Saturday) at
> 10:00 CEST which is UTC/GMT +2.


for future reference and also to avoid pasting big chunks of text over
IRC, here is my contributon to the meeting that's going to start soon.

my remarks wrt. last week
=========================

planning vs. reports
--------------------

Plans for last week were:

1. reconsider implementation language e. g. vala vs python
2. try GDM's tests to run a) default greeter b) python implementation
3. fix git layout (remove 'upstream', move everything to 'master')
4. fix project build bia git-buildpackage
5. sketch-out GDM's panel dbus interface and greeter\panel interactions

Most of those are silently ignored in the report, as if never planned.
What's their status?

timing and mentoring
--------------------

Context: last week, I expressed concerns with how things went in this
area, and we agreed on "every friday before 10am CEST == report (blog
post + ML) + detailed timeline update for next week". We also agreed
on "the (wiki, Git repositories) state should reflect the current
state of your work, past decisions / choices / conclusions, and future
plans". I expressed "I just cannot be a proper mentor if I receive
code dumps only once a week". In these areas, last week was a failure
IMHO.

I'm very much concerned with how things go.

1. Weekly report arrived on the ML late (i.e. I was already offline
for 24h) so I could not read it soon enough to.
2. First question from Max arrived on Friday morning.
3. Max was supposed to commit and push earlier: I could see nothing
pushed at Friday 12:00 CEST (which anyway was the
gdm-community-greeter original code), so there was little to
review.

=> I am not available as a full time mentor from Friday 00:02 AM to
Saturday 12:00 AM. I can *not* to concentrate all of the weekly
mentor/student relationship into 34 hours. It's not possible to go on
like that. I cannot a) spend most of the week running "git pull" that
show me nothing; b) receive all of Max work in one big load on Friday
c) answer, comment and help quickly on Max work before Saturday's
meeting.

Max, did you actually do *anything* before Thursday, apart of the
email you sent to tails-dev? If university workload overwhelmed you,
well, we'll deal with that somehow.


VCS conversion
--------------

bzr vs. Git: it's unclear to me why you're trying to track the
gdm-community-greeter bzr history (+ the .bzr directory) in a Git
branch, while the best you're going to do, as it seems, is to inject
some code snapshots into your own branch from time to time.

It's unclear to me what relationship you plan tails-greeter to have
with gdm-community-greeter. Stay close? At what cost?

1. If you plan to stay real close, it makes sense to share VCS
histories, trying Tailor harder or switching to Bazaar yourself.
2. If you plan to diverge anyway (which I told you a few days ago was
likely to happen), why bother sharing histories?

gdm-community-greeter
---------------------

Have you successfully run it? If you did, on what Ubuntu / Debian version?

misc
====

- you eventually fixed your Debian packages build environment
(pbuilder, cowdancer, git-buildpackage), isn't it? you really should
write such things in your reports, and maybe prepare your reports
incrementally, taking notes as soon as you achieve something. This
may avoid the "almost empty report" effect.

questions
=========

- It's unclear to me how the "Near-future plans" drawn in your latest
report interract with next week's plans I can read in your timeline.
Please explain and fix/merge/whatever.

the future
==========

- I would like to do the initial Debian packaging work on
gdm-community-greeter myself next week. Then you'll maintain it. I'd
better see you concentrate on things you are able to get moving a
bit faster from now on.


--
intrigeri <intrigeri@???>
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