"Marcus" == Marcus Denker denker@iam.unibe.ch writes:
Marcus> submit changesets.
Marcus> Harvesting ist not about "we need to do X". It's just about Marcus> "Someone has already done Y, let's get it in the release".
Marcus,
I understand your frustration. However, I think that moving Squeak forward requires more cooperation from the harvesters themselves.
To take my own case, I had to revert to using a 3.7 image for my work because of the refusal of the harvesters to guarantee that the 3.8 unstable stream will be incremental[1]. I really liked to fix bugs as I found them instead of using workarounds. I really liked to distract myself from serious work for a few dozens of minutes by going through the BFAV and reviewing changesets. But I really *had to* go back to 3.7 because I don't feel like using two radically different images, one for my serious work and one for my bugfixing/reviewing work, and I can't loose time to reinstall all my environment in a new image (I work on several projects at the same time) when the unstable update stream gets modified back in time.
As I stated before, I think that Squeak, as other software projects, will get better only if people can use the development version daily and base their work on it, even if there are obvious stability concerns in doing so (this is a development version after all and people should be ready to get bogus updates and fix them).
Don't get me wrong: I am not complaining, I am just giving an example where someone quite productive (regarding the rate of my submissions and reviews at the end of 3.7 and the beginning of 3.8alpha) had to stop because the current handling of the unstable stream[2] is not compatible with the available resources.
I am still hoping that at some point you will change your mind, or that you will add new harvesters if more are needed. The Debian GNU/Linux distribution for example works that way: you can always go forward, you never need to go backward; if something gets broken, it gets fixed later.
Sam
Notes: [1] Except of course if the update mechanism itself has been badly broken and needs to be fixed back in time.
[2] That is removing bogus updates rather than reverting them, because it takes much less time for the harvesters.