[Tinyos Core WG] Instructions for contributing code

[Prabal Dutta]

On 11/30/06, henri dubois-ferriere <henridf at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 01/12/06, Philip Levis <pal at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> > On Nov 30, 2006, at 12:11 AM, henri dubois-ferriere wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > - Top-level organisation: Why organise things by institution name?
> > > That's in my view one of the drawbacks of the 1.x organization. It
> > > doesn't seem like a relevant top-level structure (do I typically
> > > search for "any code from UCX" or  for "a routing protocol"?), and it
> > > also doesn't seem compatible with the hope (I assume that its shared
> > > by others) that one day a sizeable amount of contributions come from
> > > individuals working on their own account (like for most other
> > > successful open source projects).
> >
> > The directory structure is mostly for management and to keep related
> > things close. The index is intended to be the way to find things,

By management, do you mean a convention for managing the directory
namespace?  Since there's no connection between directory structure
and namespace, I don't see the benefit of this organization from a
management perspective.  Who within, say "UCB", will help "manage" the
UCB namespace?  Will the caretakers do it?  Will the first one who has
write access?

I also question whether this would actually "keep related things
close."  The only relation that is kept close is that the authors all
labor under the same organizational umbrella or are co-located
geographically.

> > e.g., "a routing protocol." Levels of indirection considered helpful.
> >
>
> I understand that such a directory structure certainly isnt to make
> searching and browsing easier.

I would argue that the proposed structure neither makes management
easier nor keeps related things close in a dimension that is relevant
to the codebase.  But, something organized around functionality, like
Henri suggests, does make searching and browsing easier and more
intuitive.

> Can you cite any successful (read: that is not written and used in
> majority by residents of academia) open source project where things
> are organised out based on where the author of some module happens to
> work as opposed to what kind of functionality the module actually
> offers? I can't.

Value judgement: I think related code being close together is more
useful than unrelated code created under the aegis of a single
organzation.

- Prabal

> > Phil
> >
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