[Vm-dev] a Cog branch

[Igor Stasenko]

On 25 June 2010 22:11, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> On 6/25/2010 2:18 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>
>> Maybe you have not developed using a distributed versioning system yet? A
>> DCVS would be for the VM what the trunk process is for the Squeak image.
>
> But the trunk model is powerful because it is *centralized* and because it
> *avoids* forking. Don't confuse the technical ability to fork with
> *desirability*. What I hear people saying in this discussion is "oh, this
> will be so great, we can all just fork like crazy". It is the attitude about
> the desirability of forking that I object to.
>
I disagree.
A trunk development model is decentralized!
Think: Before that we got a release teams, which were much more
centralized comparing to trunk.
And release team was a major bottleneck and reason of dissatisfaction
of many developers,
who either leaved community (loss of man resources) or created own
fork (split of man resources), such as Pharo.

In any case, let make one thing clear: keeping things under strict
control, and having all levers under your fingertips
doesn't gives any guarantees that there will be no more forks. It is
pointless and delusional.

Once we removed this bottleneck and allowed a much wider range of
developers to freely contribute to
trunk, we got much faster development. And i feel that trunk model
makes appearance of new forks much less
probable than with release teams model. Correct me if i wrong.

So, what i actually proposing is to do the same with VM. Nothing else!
Currently the VM development is centralized and in direct control of
few people.
And the fact is, that these people simply don't have time to overlook
of all activity around VM (i could quote
your own reply in this thread), and also when there are few people
who deciding, what to include and what not, the risk of strategic
mistake is very high.

I don't even want to mention that inability to deal with this
bottleneck were the major reason why
Pharo forked out from Squeak. Now, apply this situation to VM.
Same case: in order to prevent a major forking, we should loose the
control, and allow contribution
in a masses. This is where github could play the same role as trunk does.

> It is *not* desirable to fork.
>

Me too.
And, obviously,  if you don't wanna forks to pop up, then you should
put VM on github :)

P.S. besides. Cog is a fork. So, how this complies with "It is *not*
desirable to fork." ? ;)

> Cheers,
>  - Andreas
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.