Status of OpenSlide support

Mahadev Satyanarayanan satya at cs.cmu.edu
Mon Mar 25 11:42:19 EDT 2019


Ah!  Thank you for the clarification, Adam.  I thought you meant
a completely new fork with permanent independent life 
(e.g. OpenOffice and LibreOffice).
   -- Satya

On Monday 25 March 2019 11:28:09 Adam Goode wrote:
> Hi Satya,
> 
> I agree it's best to always have a plan to bring forked changes into the
> main openslide project.
> GitHub is a little unusual in the sense that nearly all proposed changes
> start out as a "fork": https://github.com/openslide/openslide/pulls is a
> list of forks whose authors have proposed them to be merged.
> https://github.com/openslide/openslide/network/members is a list of some
> forks (folks who are doing some sort of development).
> 
> It takes a good amount of time to review code and help get code into a high
> quality, merge-ready state. I think it is to the benefit of anyone using
> OpenSlide to help contribute to this.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Adam
> 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 10:50 Mahadev Satyanarayanan <satya at cs.cmu.edu>
> wrote:
> 
> > 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
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > openslide-users mailing list
> > > > openslide-users at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> > > > https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/mailman/listinfo/openslide-users
> > > >
> > >
> >
> 


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