Andreas Raab wrote:
> Hi Keith -
>
> I really appreciate your attempt to compromise. I appreciate even more
> that you are acknowledging that the processes are orthogonal and not
> contradictory.
>
> My biggest concern with the proposal is that you seem to be committing
> other people's time over a period of time that you yourself will be
> unavailable.
If things had worked out differently then I might have been more
available. Having recent somewhat unpredictable events has adversely
effected my deadlines, and I need to make a concerted effort to get back
on track otherwise I am really scuppered once and for all.

I am using Bob for a part of a commercial project so I am still
contributing but under the guise of real work.
> Considering that the people who you've signed up may have other plans
> and that you are not around for any guidance, how well do you think
> this will work?
I will be available on irc, and skype for brief chats.
> Secondly, you are adding several new dependencies in the process of
> getting to a result, including "2-10 grand refactorings" plus
> DeltaStreams. That is unrealistic. Nobody can commit to grand
> refactorings that haven't even been proposed.
My aim here is to encourage people who are motivated to work on things
anyway, to be able to work on things that are a) not on a critical path
for 3.11 and b) will be most useful, in such a way as their efforts will
not work at cross purposes to anything that is on the critical path.

Your concern that I am adding dependencies is not the case. We are not
dependant upon these projects for 3.11, however we are dependent upon
these if we want to have anything but fixes to include for 3.12. I would
like to see atomic loading in there though, and its not like we are
short of new/better stuff in 3.11-build (the version of 3.11 for
building images, as opposed to 3.10-build which is our starting point).
> Can't we just choose the available fixes from Mantis *now* and apply
> them, and build a 3.11 release candidate *today*?
Yes we can, and as I explained it would take very few lines of code in
bob to do just that. But I envisaged that in the time I take to get
around to it, lots of people would have started harvesting fixes and
tests into trunk, and as a result changing the status levels in mantis
and generally turning what is already a confused mess into something
even worse.

So I figured that if the best coding folks could be motivated to do real
useful projects, then they wouldn't start spending their time
harvesting. And if the bug busting, mantis crew could be motivated to
test and consolidate what we have already, they too would be doing what
they know and love(?) best, and would be making things better for the
scripts when they are run.
> This wouldn't require committing time from other people, it wouldn't
> put additional dependencies in the way; all it requires is to sit down
> and actually run those scripts and produce an artifact from it.
And that is what I don't have time to do right now even though it is
probably trivial.

The structure that I have in mind is

Squeak3.10.2-build --> BobBuild310Fixes --> Squeak2.10.2-fixes

#description ^ 'Squeak3.10.2-fixes is a build including all the fixes
that have passed testing for inclusion
into the next squeak release. These fixes are currently marked "Fixed In
3.11" in mantis.

This image includes all of the fixes that 3.10 users might reliably
apply to their images,
and a selection of these fixes may be chosen to form 3.10.3'

Squeak3.10.2-build --> BobBuild310NewFix --> Squeak2.10.2-newfix

#description ^ 'When a fix has its status changed on mantis, this build
action loads that fix into the base image and runs the tests'.

Squeak2.10.2-fixes  --> Squeak310PlusOne buildTestCandidate -->
Squeak3.11-stable-test-candidate

Squeak2.10.2-fixes  --> Load Testing fixes -> Squeak310PlusOne
buildTestCandidate --> Squeak3.11-unstable-test-candidate

regards

Keith