[Mailman-Developers] Should we move to Bazaar?

[Barry Warsaw]

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On May 3, 2007, at 10:42 PM, Ethan Fremen wrote:

> Barry Warsaw wrote:
>
>> Of course, I think it /will/ make our lives harder in some ways.  As
>> we've seen, folks like cPanel have their own forks that they modify,
>> and then their users come looking to us for support, which we can't
>> give them.  Having more public branches out there will increase our
>> support costs.
>
> I would submit that much of what has caused people in the Mailman
> community to maintain their own forks is because the software  
> design is
> insufficiently open, not so much on account of checkin privileges.

It's both I think, and they're related.  The link is the FSF  
copyright assignment requirement, but that is a can of worms I really  
don't want to open up right now.  My hope is that a dvcs will allow  
us to break that link and let innovation occur independently of the  
legal impositions.

> Moving Mailman development to distributed trees will force, I suspect,
> more modularization and extensibility of the code, which will  
> reduce the
> need for long-lived, independent forks.

Modularization is a very high priority for me in the next release.

> Basically, I suspect that while it might increase support issues in  
> the
> short term, it will ultimately reduce the support-to-participant  
> ratio.

That's my hope too.

- -Barry

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