the great state of the linuxppc-dev community

[jeramy b smith]

I agree with some of what Dan says although I would choose different words and
a different focus.

Development is not so much 'splintered' as it just has no 'center.' If you
read the history of the ppc sources, you'll see that this is how it has always
been. BUT, development is become more centralized out of mere evolution. For
instance, here is a piece of 'voodoo' known only to a handful; the #mklinux
channel on EFNet usually has 2 or more kernel developers on. Today I
discovered that a kernel couldn't be built with having an asm-m68k include
directory in your source tree. Instead of submitting a patch full of ifdefs to
this mailing list, I just told Ben who was there and he added it to his tree.
Eventually, this will wind up in Paul's.

Sure, things are not as centralized as they could be. There is no
linuxppc-kernel mailing list so that all new patches can be easily reviewed by
peers and announcement for to-do lists can be posted. I'll set one up on my
dedicated majordomo server but this would depend on whether the maintainers
would go for it. In my opinion, to-do lists are the most needed thing. Many
kernel development tasks such as cleaning up messy code and documentation
could be handled by some of the wanna-be hackers (like me) while people like
Ani, Ben, Paul, Cort, and Geert are writing drivers and merging new features.
To-do lists would also give people who want to get in on the deeper
development process an idea where they can start.

Linux/PPC just needs a bit of small, easy to implement, non-annoying, project
management. The maintainers do an awesome job based on the amount of help/time
available but a little bit of centralization of communication could increase
the amount of volunteers doing meaningful work.


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