Process, harvesting, getting your favorite things in the image

Adam Spitz adspitz at yahoo.ca
Mon Mar 10 06:50:22 UTC 2003


Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

>     Frankly, guys, you are scaring me off.  I've got
> my "collect into" stuff about ready to send off, but
> the amount of annotation you apparently require has
> passed my complexity threshold and is headed for the
> top of the lightning rod.

I've got the same feeling. The current process is
really kinda intimidating, at least for a newcomer
like me. But I figure it's just temporary.

After writing almost none of the code, I somehow ended
up as the steward for the "Debugger - stub method
creation" package on SqueakMap. Very soon after that,
Alain Fischer posted some code that he'd written for
the same purpose; I incorporated it into the package
and re-released it. Then Ned Konz pointed out a bug,
so I fixed that and re-released again.

This all happened pretty quickly. As the steward of
the package, I know the code pretty well, and I take
personal pride in its goodness. I'd love it if people
sent me enhancements that had already been reviewed by
multiple people, or that included SUnit tests, but it
isn't necessary; if someone wants to send me a vague
prose description of a bug or a suggestion for a
trivial little refactoring, that's fine with me, and
I'll be grateful for the help. And it's nice to know
that people can send me tiny little requests like that
without bothering the rest of the mailing list.

I try to be as careful as I can, but I'm not
particularly scared of releasing code with bugs in it;
as soon as a bug comes to my attention, I'll just fix
it and re-release. The only people who'll see the bug
are the ones who download the package between the time
I create the bug and the time I fix it.

The Harvesters can't afford to be this loose. They've
got a much bigger code base to worry about, and the
consequences of mistakes are higher. Naturally they
want to institute a more heavyweight process to help
ease their load. An even better solution, though, is
just for the rest of us to take as much of the code as
we can and split it apart from the image and take
responsibility for it ourselves.

Lately I decided that I'd like to use Celeste for my
e-mail. I'm sure that I'll end up wanting to make lots
of little changes to it, and I don't particularly like
the idea of going through this new Harvesting process
to get those changes approved, so I've been looking
into making a removal change set for Celeste. After
that, I'm hoping that someone more qualified than me
will take stewardship of it, so that I can send my
change requests to that person - but if not, then I'm
willing to take it myself.


Adam Spitz




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