I agree that there is some benefit that is gained only when a contribution makes it into the official streams, and therefore the continuity of the official stream does matter.
However, sometimes that has to be disturbed. Looking at another community, sometimes Linus goes on vacation. But the important thing is that when he gets back, he merges lots and lots of patches, because there's lots of patches that have been accumulating in a ready state in other peoples repositories.
So I think its important to figure out how to do everything that can be done outside the official stream to help the official stream work better. It used to be reviews and testing, and that worked to some extent (wasn't great). Now we have similar activities in Mantis, and I think that is insufficient in pretty much the same ways (not enough people doing it, because its too far outside Squeak, and there's no immediate benefit, and I think the email notifications aren't smart enough - needs something like roundup).
I think what we need is more people merging in other peoples stuff and putting the merged versions in public repositories. When someone bothers to merge something and put it out publically, they're probably telling you something quite meaningful about it. We still don't have a way to gather this feedback, but that wouldn't be hard (show all descendants of a version to see who is using some variation on it, and what variations exist).
Daniel
Marcus Denker wrote:
I don't think the direct process of harvesting is the most important part here, but getting an "official" image out there with the bugs fixed... having the fixes in the inbox in mc is not too different then having them in mantis, somehow... people who know that they need them could install them, but the image downloaded does not have them, nor do you see them when loading updates...
Marcus