[Debburn-devel] minutes of debburn/cdrkit team meeting, 2006-09-05

[Peter Samuelson]

The debburn/cdrkit maintainers held an IRC meeting on #debburn on
irc.debian.org, Tuesday, 2006-09-05, 19:00 UTC.  26 people were in the
channel.  Participating and "actively lurking":

  * Joerg Jaspert, developer / project admin
  * Eduard Bloch, developer
  * Steve McIntyre, developer
  * Peter Samuelson, contributor
  * Luis Medinas, Gentoo cdrtools maintainer
  * Christian Fromme, contributor
  * Motoko Aoyama

(Note: in these minutes, "Joerg" is Joerg Jaspert, _not_ former
upstream maintainer Joerg Schilling.)

Joerg opened the meeting at 19:02 with a question: "Do we want to go
away from source compatibility with cdrtools?"  He believes that
license problems prevent merging most patches from cdrtools anyway,
except mkisofs.  Eduard said it's possible to encourage contributors to
send patches to both forks; Peter and Joerg suggested that patches
might flow from cdrkit to cdrtools.  Steve expressed some doubt that
Joerg Schilling ever accepts outside patches to cdrecord anyway.
Consensus was that source-level compatibility is _not_ worth the
trouble, although command-line compatibility with cdrecord shall be
provided at least until after etch is released.

Joerg proposed a hacking policy of doing disruptive changes on a
branch, and keeping the development trunk stable.  Nobody disagreed.

Joerg asked whether to split the source into multiple tarballs - wodim,
cdda2wav, mkisofs, possibly the support libraries.  He suggested that
this be done after etch.  Luis thought separate tarballs would be
easier to maintain.  Peter thought it was a good idea, though possibly
a lot of work due to the use of libscg and libschily.  Joerg agreed.
Steve wanted to start phasing out libschily, as "we should be able to
assume a working libc for our target platforms".  More general
agreement, though Joerg was concerned about ensuring portability.
Peter asked for confirmation that cdrkit can officially require ANSI C.
(The question had come up earlier as an aside, and several people had
agreed.)  Joerg proposed that this happen on a branch.  Everyone
agreed.  Eduard asked for confirmation that the 'mods-archive'
directory (a set of Debian cdrtools patches, already applied to cdrkit)
could be deleted or moved.  [Two minutes later he moved it outside the
main tree.]

Joerg asked about a policy for deciding to give someone svn commit
access.  He noted that while some contributors are well known from
Debian work, other current and future contributors will come from
outside Debian and will not be well known here.  Peter suggested that
it be decided simply based on a history of good patches.  Steve agreed.
Eduard suggested also requiring a gpg chain-of-trust.  Joerg agreed
that it's necessary to see some patches before giving a person commit
access, and suggested that when someone asks for access, an existing
commiter "advocate" the person.  Luis thought that was fair.

Eduard asked for opinions on a "copyright messages" policy, given the
potential for social and legal FUD and harassment from the original
upstream author.  Peter clarified that this was about user-visible
output messages, not copyright notices inside the source, which must be
retained regardless.  Joerg suggested leaving the original copyright
lines in the output, and adding a line for the current maintainers
where appropriate, as well as a notice not to bother the original
author.  Peter was unhappy with the verbose report currently output.
Eduard proposed adding even more text, including the address for bug
reports (debburn-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org).  Consensus was to add
this notice, but also streamline the whole header somewhat.  [Eduard
wrote and committed a patch for this a few minutes after the meeting].

Eduard asked what to do about the bugs now open against cdda2wav and
mkisofs in the Debian BTS.  He suggested to "ping the contributors,
wait 4 weeks, close?"  Joerg agreed.

After a bit of off-meeting-topic discussion, Joerg declared the meeting
adjourned at 19:35.
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