Collaboration is not always an easy thing: Talking, meetings, making decisions and finding compromises. Sometimes I have the impression that some people in our business find this inter personal activities very exhausting and thus prefer to work on their own. Depending on how genius one is that works far. But for obvious reasons working alone has limits. If we talk about a whole Linux distribution for example one can not succeed: The working power, creativity and time of one is not enough.

That is one reason why we consider it as one of the keys for success that the Build Service enables people to work together in a useful and non annoying way. We think of tools in the Build Service which help. That is difficult because some formalism and guidance (in business often called ‘process’) is needed to keep things going in a transparent and reproduceable way. Control should stay there where it needs to be, for example at the maintainer of a project. On the other hand collaboration tools should not constrict people and their working together.

Here is a little story of Karl who wants to change something in the openSUSE Factory project. He needs to work with the Factory maintainers and this is how that is planned for the future:

Karl, a developer working for a small software company, loves openSUSE but not really the one package Kabax because there is a packaging problem Karl has analyzed.

Karl wants to change that to make sure that the next version of openSUSE contains a good version of Kabax.

For that, a branch of Kabax in Factory is needed where the fixes can be put in, built and tested. Karl uses osc to create a branch. The package is not really maintained in Factory itself, because the few Factory maintainers can not care about all packages there. Kabax has a Devel Project entry in its meta data that points to the project where it is actually maintained by the expert Karsten.

Because of the devel project, osc branches not really from the Factory package but from the development project where the development happens by Karsten. That might be different from the Factory package, but is clearly the development version that soon will be synced to Factory. When that happens is up to Karsten and the maintainers of Factory.

In the branch Karl starts to work on Kabax and creates a beautiful patch. Since his branch package also lives on the Build Service, it builds live for all relevant repos and along the changes of the devel project.

Once Karl is happy with his work he raises the attention of Karsten on his change by creating a submit request. A request in general informs others of something somebody else has done which requires action. In the case of the submit request it tells Karsten that there is a valuable change to his package that should make it’s way to Factory. Karsten now accepts the request and Karls contribution is in.

The nice thing about all this is also that the branch packages as well as the requests are open and visible to everybody who is interested in. That gives us the transparency we need. And of course that does not only work for Factory but for all projects if one wants to change something on a package where he/she does not have permissions yet.

How do you like this story?