Taking control of parts of Squeak

Roel Wuyts roel.wuyts at iam.unibe.ch
Fri Feb 21 20:14:13 UTC 2003


On Friday, February 21, 2003, at 07:15 PM, Tim Rowledge wrote:

>
>> But now Squeak is an airplane (a fast, fancy one) without a pilot.
> As one of the completely unpaid people putting in outrageous amounts of
> time to pilot Squeak as best we can I'm a tiny bit offended by this
> metaphor.

Sorry, I am just trying to explain the feeling we have and I am really 
not trying to offend anybody. I was replying to the other mail where 
Martin was afraid of some form of dictatorship where the maintainer 
would have absolute control. This should not happen. With I tried to 
express (second try) was that a certain vacuum was left lately. I don't 
mean this in a bad way, since I know everybody is trying its best. But 
I strongly believe that some form of clear responsibilities for certain 
parts could be a good thing. That's what we try to express, nothing 
more, nothing less. And for this to work there has to be some clear 
process. Or, if people decide that this is not a good thing and that we 
continue the way we are going, that is ok as well.

>
> We (and I mean _everybody_ not just the guides etc) are all trying to 
> do
> the right thing - the last person trying to do the wrong thing was
> picked up just last week by the Dept of Squeakland Security Special
> Police.  Yes, things don't go as fast as most of us would like. Things
> will get left out. Guess what - it's just like real life!

No problem whatsoever.

>
> My view on 'ownership' and big changes is that the people working on
> major changes are definitely _not_ the people that should decide on
> go/no-go precisely becase they have such a vested interest. I'll review
> other peoples code, even my own code as best I can, but I _never_ rely
> on my own view of my own code without a backup reviewer. Ain't wise.

Agreed again.

>
> Big changes need big reviews by several people - preferably including 
> at
> least one 'naive' person that we can hope will spot the dumb mistake
> every expert view just slides over because it's too obvious.

Yep. We are not arguying to abandon this process, but trying to 
decentralize some parts of it.

>
> tim
> -- 
> Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
> Useful random insult:- Diarrhea of the mouth; constipation of the 
> ideas.
>
>
Roel Wuyts                                                   Software 
Composition Group
roel.wuyts at iam.unibe.ch                       University of Bern, 
Switzerland
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~wuyts/
Board Member of the European Smalltalk User Group: www.esug.org



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