open process issues (was: Roadmap proposal for 3.10/4.0)

Marcus Denker denker at iam.unibe.ch
Tue Oct 17 21:43:46 UTC 2006


>
> For small changes, we still seem to be operating in a vacuum.  I am
> unmotivated to fix bugs in core Squeak and in the Unix port, because
> in both cases the fixes are often ignored.  SharedQueue, one of our
> fundamental synchronization constructs, has been broken for over a
> year now, despite a fix being available [4].  Should I ever again blow
> away a Saturday like that?  Nobody likes being a sucker who fights
> harder for something than its own management.

I added this improved SharedQueue as SharedQueue2 to 3.9 very early:

| MarcusDenker  10-07-05 18:09  in 3.9 for further testing

Sadly, nobody tested it. The next entry on mantis is yours from end  
of september
(we where past gamma then, so we can't do this change):

| lexspoon  09-28-06 10:47
| It has been a year, now, and no problems have come to light. We  
should start migrating to this.
|  All it requires is replacing SharedQueue by SharedQueue2.

So I don't see how it is my fault to not have added this: It is a  
grave change, breaking
the image on that level is far from fun, so this is not a fix to be  
added and then tested
("let's see if it works"). It needs at least some testing by someone  
before that.

If somebody would have tested it, I would have added it to 3.9a.

Even your note, if you would have posted that half a year earlier,  
this change
would be in 3.9. Or you could have written a mail. *something*.  
*anything*.

What I think as strange is that people critize so hard for the  
percived fact that
there was a bottleneck in getting things accepted in 3.9. I don't  
think that there
was a too big one, compared to earlier release cycles. There was a  
bottleneck
in reviewing and testing. And with that, everybody could have helped.  
And some
people did.

In 3.9a, we managed to get mantis down to 275 entries, closing over 800.
That's *a lot*. And two month ago, I would have bet that if people  
would evaluate
the negative aspects of 3.9a, they would have said something like a)  
"this guy adds
every crap", not "b) there is a bottleneck, nothing got accepted".  
And I am actually even
now convenced that a) actually is kind of more true than b).

          Marcus





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