Per Jessen
[...] this is one thing I've been thinking about on and off - how exactly does the community contribute to openSUSE?
* through the openSUSE Build Service in packaging * through discussions via mails, forums, IRC - both technical discussions and helping others * through testing * through marketing * through coding
Not openSUSE the distro, but openSUSE the packaging, framework, concept - whatever it is that sets openSUSE apart. After all, the software distributed is the same.
I understand that areas such as translation are easy to open to community support, but your comments were made in the context of the partitioner and ext4, i.e. YaST, a very key element to openSUSE.
Personally (and partially speaking on behalf of my company too), I'd like to contribute in the areas of JFS and LILO support. Both have been or are being deprecated support-wise, which I am or have been quite vocal about.
So, as we are talking about the YaST/partitioner, the key question is:
who decides what goes into it?
Arvin works on it (see http://lizards.opensuse.org/author/aschnell/) and he has his priorities set by Novell. But if you send him any patches, he's more than happy to take it.
Is this true open source, or is it a Novell product management decision?
See my answer on the factory list.
Who is the project lead on YaST? How does one submit patches? Who decides what is accepted and what is rejected?
Submit them on the yast-devel mailing list and you will get an answer. For existing modules from the authors, for new modules from Jiri, Duncan and Stano who are basically what you call the "project lead".
For instance - why might ext4 get accepted/supported whilst JFS got kicked out earlier? I dare say their level of support/testing is about the same ATM.
ATM - but not moving forward: AFAIK there's no long-term commitment from anybody for JFS, it's dead - but ext4 is maturing. The yast partitioner so far allows JFS partitions but gives a bit warning - and on the other hand it cannot yet create ext4 partitions at all. There are two aspects to a file system: Is it tested and does it work? And IMO ext4 gets currently more testing than JFS. But for Novell the more important question is: Do we have engineers that can fix a bug in a filesystem? We have those for ext4 but there's nobody for JFS and that's why it's "officially unsupported - use at your own risk". Hope this helps a bit, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Director Platform / openSUSE, aj@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126