Incorporating new changes (was Re: 3.9alpha update stream)

[Doug Way]

On Tue, 5 Jul 2005 23:05:17 +0200, "stéphane ducasse"
<ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> said:
> 
> > In the short term, one thing we could do is simply make changes to the
> > System package and other core packages directly in the 39a repository,
> > since we don't have master repositories for these packages yet.  I
> > hesitate to suggest this, though, as this is still too centralized a
> > model.  But if we have trouble finding package maintainers, we may end
> > up having to do this for some packages in the short term.
> 
> My impression is that we should go slowly and do not go crazy and  
> decentralized too fast.
> For well identified packages such as MC this is really ok but for the  
> others this can be really a mess as I mentioned.

I think I agree.  Maybe for some of the well-defined "outer" packages
such as Balloon, Movies, Speech, etc., we should try to find maintainers
and get someone to set up master repositories soon for those, at least. 
(Hm, some of those maybe don't even need to be in Basic, they could just
be part of Full.)

But some of the core packages haven't really been properly detangled
yet, so we may have a lot of changes which cut across several packages. 
Maybe these core packages (Kernel, Collections, Morphic, etc) should be
maintained in the 39a repository for the short term until they are
better detangled.  Certainly the detangling work itself will definitely
cut across multiple packages and would be easier to do directly in the
39a repository.  (Although the work of the Morphic Splitters team is
obviously relevant here, I'll have to see what progress they made.) 
Comments from Daniel and any other detangling experts? :)

Actually, both the Morphic Splitters and the Toolbuilder work involve
some detangling, and we'd probably want to look at incorporating both of
those earlier rather than later.  (At a certain point we just have to
pick which order these are incorporated... e.g. 1. Morphic Splitters  2.
Toolbuilder refactoring  3. previous 3.9alpha changes... whichever goes
first has the least amount of merging to do.)

- Doug