[squeak-dev] A New Community Development Model

Joshua Gargus schwa at fastmail.us
Thu Jul 2 07:33:30 UTC 2009


Norbert Hartl wrote:
> Hi,
>
> this proposal is really a step towards openness. I'm glad you added
> the inbox to your original proposal. Without that it wasn't really
> welcoming work from others. 
>
> I still don't think that Monticello is the right way to go. It doesn't
> really manage changes. I can so easily overwrite a change that was
> applied before that it is hard to use. You can argue that you have to
> be careful anyway and that you can merge. You are right but still it
> is hard to use. 

Do you have an alternative?  I use Monticello every day in a
heavily-developed commercial codebase, and don't run into significant
problems.

> Another thing is pharo. All of my contribution to the
> image I did in pharo because I never saw much a chance to do this in
> squeak. Now it can be doable. And doing something in pharo and not be
> able to do it in squeak at the same time strikes me really. Using 
> always Monticello with full source compare will prevent applying fixes
> from one team to the other. The sources are just more different every
> day.
>
>   

Again, do you have an alternative?  I don't think that there currently
exists a technical solution to this problem (nor can one, to the extent
that the codebases really are different).  Maybe someday Squeak and
Pharo will merge, but that will be after we overcome social challenges,
not technical ones.

> For the new setup to work well there is still one thing to do IMHO. 
> Sooner or later the bug tracker should help in organizing and 
> documenting changes. But mantis is in an awful state. There are nearly
> 2200 tickets in the database. Coming from the outside it looks like
> really nobody cares. A bug tracker with less tickets and tickets that
> give an overview what is going on right now is essential. Maybe not
> for the gurus and old timers but for everyone else (e.g. me). I would
> like to propose a cleaning initiative of mantis. I would expect a lot
> of these old bugs to be obsolete by now. So a quick check if this bug
> is still valid can be done. And then if it is invalid you just need
> to close it. 
>
>   

Good point.  I'm hopeful that the process that Andreas describes will
lower the barriers to addressing some of the bugs listed in Mantis.

Cheers,
Josh


> Norbert
>
>
>   




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