Boosting the development effort
Hello trisquel community,
Luis here, I'll like to start thanking all of you who have commented, shared a fix, valuable info and/or donated to the project.
Recently I'll like to thank anyone reporting issues on the new bug tracker at the GitLab instance, they keep growing.
As you might know there is an ongoing work to increase the development, the support for new architectures on the latest Aramo release and a overhaul in general of the whole project, as a result the project is continuously growing in the amount of work to be done, while the development team not so much.
Rubén and I have shared some thoughts and we see the need to point out the steps on how to contribute on development, rework the documentation, and ease the participation of new developers or contributors.
In that train of thought, I've like invite the community in general, and users in particular that would like to learn the trisquel development tools and workflow to start contributing on the maintenance for the project, some kind of "mentorship" if you will, as you might know the development meetings are Wednesdays at 12hrs ET, but you might find me online most of the week, as I'll be mainly involved on this effort.
Please note that this will be an ongoing process to learn how to find, identify, test and resolve issues within the trisquel workflow, not designed as coding classes.
Anyone interested please join us at the #trisquel-dev channel on IRC at the libera.chat network, you can post your doubts here or at the development mailing list.
Thank you for your attention, and keep enjoying this great project and community around it.
Cheers!
Hi,
About the Git Lab instance, it's inaccessible without JavaScript, I use among others, NoScript for privacy reasons, so, as is, I cannot help with the bug tracker.
I found a Git that works without JavaScript: SourceHut, you might take a look to see if it would suite your needs by gaining trust amongst those that like me prefer to avoid JavaScript for privacy reasons.
Also, imposing JavaScript is an accessibility issue, for example, people with visual deficiencies might not have a screen reader that deals with JavaScript.
Thanks for taking this in consideration.
Greetings.
> About the Git Lab instance, it's inaccessible without JavaScript, I use among others, NoScript for privacy reasons, so, as is, I cannot help with the bug tracker.
No problem, anyone that would not accept any javascript on their browser can use the devel mailing, personally I am willing to go the extra mile to meet someone there if there is a real intention to contribute.
> Also, imposing JavaScript is an accessibility issue, for example, people with visual deficiencies might not have a screen reader that deals with JavaScript.
On an ideal world we would already have all the tools already accesible for anyone and not only that, they would meet all our requirements.
That's not the case yet, there has been a lot of pondering on what we can do and we can accept in order to continue improving, as result we got the current state of Trisquel's Gitlab instance.
I agree that it's not the perfect solution, but is good enough to keep work moving forward, maybe with a more robust dev team eventually we'll be able to migrate to something better when possible.
My point is that gitlab should not be seen as a wall to stop new willing contributors to join.
Lugodunos:
> About the Git Lab instance, it's inaccessible without JavaScript, I use among others, NoScript for privacy reasons, so, as is, I cannot help with the bug tracker.
As Ark74 says, there are other channels you can use to report bugs and participate in Trisquel development that don't require JavaScript. But...
I use NoScript too. It allows you to easily toggle JS served from a particular domain to Trusted, or Temp Trusted. Is there any particuar reason you don't trust the Trisquel instance of GitLab to serve you JS?
> I found a Git that works without JavaScript: SourceHut, you might take a look to see if it would suite your needs
I'm aware that transitioning to a different software forge is a huge amount of work, and can't happen in a hurry. But I do encourage Rubén and the Trisquel team to evaluate SourceHut as a possible choice for any future change of software forge. Its a web UI built using the email protocol support in Git and uses very minimal resources to host. As Lugodunos noted, using it doesn't require allowing JS.
The git email workflow can also happen with the current Trisquel infrastructure by having things like git format-patch send the email to name at domain where the other devs will then receive it.
EDIT: It looks like the forum software is trying to be smart and hide the email. It's trisquel-devel at listas.trisquel.info
The reason why I never add any trust to any domain in No-Script is because I don't want to take time to read all JavaScripts involved in the code.
Moreover, as I said, a webpage that is inaccessible without JavaScript doesn't respect some accessibility rules, so, I tend to become disdainful in regard of such a webpage and prefer to do without. That is certainly not the best attitude to have, but I am like I am because of what made me (among others nearly 25 years of web-mastering with more then 20 years with a particular focus on accessibility and around 15 years of doing it professionally in a part-time job). In other words, webpage inaccessible because of JavaScript bugs me like an epileptic with horribly made animated GIFs.
I am very glad that Trisquel exists and according to which values it is developed. I really appreciate what amazing work all involved people are doing.
> In other words, webpage inaccessible because of JavaScript bugs me like an epileptic with horribly made animated GIFs.
I can relate to that. I too am very much bugged by people around me who crave for web pages that avoid standards and use a horrible amount of Javacript to do useless annoying things and on top of that stuff that would work much better using the tools already implemented in browsers. This also leads to the problem that older hardware can't really display many recent web pages since all this Javascript is to resource hungry for them to handle.
Trisquel is getting more appealing to me especially now that Debian has decided to include non-free firmware into the default installer. I don't really get why they felt this was necessary since most other distros do something like this already. To me this is a betrayal of the original idea of the project. There have been plenty of options for people who don't aim to stick with free software only. But truly freedom respecting projects are very few.
I am trying to learn C++ right now using learncpp.com in my spare time. This will hopefully enable me to do more useful things in the free software movement. Nevertheless, I fear I will never reach a level in programming that might be actually useful anywhere. (I have been active in the free game Trigger Rally as a map designer for some years but things got stuck when I hit the wall of packaging – I didn't get over yet – and when the development of the code needed more hands and some strategic decisions. Unfortunately, for those reasons there hasn't been a new release in years – even if there is quite a lot of development that would have been worth a release.) I am a graphic designer by training and create mostly small individually adapted web pages using some PHP and as much bog standard HTML + CSS as possible because I am a minimalist and annoyed by the messy bloated code content management systems have. I also do leaflets and similar stuff. I have been working exclusively with free software since 2008. I occasionally give free introductory lessons on the basic usage of GIMP but I also use Inkscape and Scribus on an daily base in my fulltime job.
Unfortunately, most of the time I have the impression that my skill set and approach can't be very useful in free software projects I do care about. Also the call for increasing the development effort for Trisquel seems to aim mostly for motivating software developers. It seems what I can offer isn't needed. I have been doing outreach work on information stalls for many years too, but creating things people find useful is much more fulfilling to me.
The design of all official Trisquel material I know of is done very well and I actually do see no need for my involvement in this area.
I sometimes have the same feeling, now, we do what we do because we are what we are and even though we might not help in the development, we still can help in other ways, whatever the skills, if we have good intention, we always can be useful (even though we play a very little role, but that's not important, what is important is that we do something).
For example, we can all test a free software and give some feedback.
As far as I know Savannah is recognized as 'the' free software forge, never had an issue with it, however I've never seen it outside of gnu and nongnu.
https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html