[SF][VM] SF for VMs: Phoenix out of ashes?
Lex Spoon
lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sun Feb 11 02:42:56 UTC 2001
Bert Freudenberg <bert at isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de> wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Feb 2001, Raab, Andreas wrote:
>
> > I believe that everyone who is involved in such a project for a long
> > enough time will have phases during which one is either too busy or
> > simply too tired of doing the necessary work.
>
> Which is okay. But in a community project the work shouldn't have to stop
> for long just because one person is hindered. Further development should
> be possible, even if the next release has to wait until the maintainer
> finds the time for it. And "further development" does not just mean that
> everyone is hacking stuff on his own (this is what we're doing now), but
> that it is possible to aggregate single contributions into a common
> source tree (which must not necessarily be the "official" source tree,
> although it should not deviate too much).
>
The general model of having a central maintainer and not having multiple
cooks in the kitchen is fine. However, it hurts when releases are far
apart:
1. Contributors duplicate a lot of work, both with each other and with
the central maintainer.
2. The central maintainers get a lot of patches that don't patch
against their current code base.
Frequent releases are a way to let developers at large help out the
central maintainers. Just consider the Squeak image and its update
mechanism....
-Lex
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