Status of OpenSlide support

[Mahadev Satyanarayanan]

Hi Adam and Martin,
   Is #5 (inability to do commit changes without the help of one of the original
developers) really the showstopper at present?   I don't have that impression, but
if that's the case it is easily fixed by us granting permission to specific,
carefully-vetted individuals.   We don't have a community-developed
process in place, but for a small number of individuals it shouldn't be a 
big deal.  If you can convince Adam Goode, Benjamin Gilbert, and Jan Harkes
that you can be trusted with this role (and they tell me so), 
I can work out the mechanism.   There is no need to create a fork just to
be able to commit changes to the OpenSlide code base. 

My understanding is that it is #1 and #2 (lack of time and expertise) that is
the limiting factor to OpenSlide evolution at the moment.  Adam's advice
on #1 to #4 are right on target for  addressing that.

 Cheers
           -- Satya

On Monday 25 March 2019 10:23:15 Adam Goode wrote:
> Hi Martin,
> 
> Benjamin and I are are both quite busy with other things. I cannot speak
> for Benjamin, but in my case I am not able to take money to work on side
> projects like this. It is likely that Benjamin has a similar situation.
> 
> Given this information, how should you move forward? The typical advice I
> give to organizations interested in OpenSlide is this:
> 
> 1. Please identify someone in your organization to work on OpenSlide. This
> can be someone in your development group or research group, or possibly
> even a grad student in some circumstances.
> 2. Explicitly allocate some amount of time for this person to work on
> OpenSlide (perhaps 15-20%, possibly more while getting started).
> 3. Introduce this person to the list and me.
> 4. I will provide some of my time to answer questions and give some help
> getting started.
> 5. Depending on the circumstances, we may be able to grant permissions to
> this person to let them approve pull requests and do other things. This
> would be a good outcome, though I would have to discuss with Benjamin and
> the CMU folks exactly what criteria we would use for granting this.
> 
> Note that, completely independently, you can fork the project and make
> whatever changes you like. I encourage this! But please try to publish your
> changes as we have done, and do so under the same license so that we could
> eventually merge changes back someday. Forking may still be the correct
> thing to do even if we do steps #1-4 above, since I can't currently say
> what the criteria for #5 would be.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Adam
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 2:07 AM Martin Weihrauch <
> m.weihrauch at smartinmedia.com> wrote:
> 
> > Dear Benjamin:
> >
> > I wanted to inquire, what the status of OpenSlide is. The last commit is
> > almost 1 year old and there are some important pull requests (problem with
> > bif, Motic and introduction of VMIC) waiting to be introduced.
> >
> > I guess that you may have not the time to maintain it currently, which
> > would be sad and a problem for so many of us, who rely on it.
> >
> > Maybe some of the community here (me included) could throw in some money
> > and we could pay you or someone else e. g. a quarter or a half of his/her
> > salary to further maintain and expand this important library, which you
> > created.
> >
> > Looking forward to hearing from you.
> >
> > Martin
> > _______________________________________________
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> > openslide-users at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> > https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/mailman/listinfo/openslide-users
> >
>