Squeak 3.8 status

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Thu Aug 5 10:05:01 UTC 2004


I agree with marcus, and if I thank all the people that reviewed code. 
This really helps.

On 4 août 04, at 13:22, Marcus Denker wrote:

>
> Am 03.08.2004 um 21:01 schrieb Chris Muller:
>
>>
>> May I agitate this thread with intentions of good?
>>
>> In my personal experience, the actual submission of changes/fixes has 
>> been
>> difficult and laborious.  After the actual submission, some of them 
>> further
>> required continued hard lobbying/nagging/reminding, etc.  Even after 
>> hours of
>> work, many never made it.
>>
> Yes, that happens. There are right now 400 not-yet dealed with 
> submissions
> in BFAV. And there are only an handful of people actualy looking at 
> that stuff.
> People always think that their stuff should be added, but they in turn 
> do not
> look at anything that others submit. They just don't care.
>
> So in the end there are lots of people submitting stuff, and only 2-3 
> looking at
> the changesets.
>
>> With such a high "cost" of getting a change, it really emphasizes 
>> what Lex
>> seems to be complaining about..  That the process does not support 
>> small,
>> simple, safe fixes.  What if someone merely wants to correct a class 
>> or method
>> comment?  There's no way that's worth going through the pain of the 
>> current
>> process, not only for the submitter but for the harvester, and that's 
>> a shame
>> because lots of "baby-step" improvements can contribute a lot to the 
>> maturity
>> of a system.
>>
> All comment-only changes have been approved *very* fast over the last 
> 6 Month.
> I don't think you will find any submission of that kind that didn't 
> make it in the next
> round of updated after it was submitted.
>
> (One problem we have is that it takes much too long to get the 
> approved stuff in the
> update stream).
>
>> What if we used an approach where, say, during the alpha phase, the 
>> community
>> *as a whole* had an opportunity to make and eat its own dog food.
>>
>>   - anyone can submit a change/fix that will make it to a 
>> publicly-accessible
>> update repository ("the update stream?")
>>   - anyone can bring in these current public changes from others a la 
>> "update"
>> mode, i.e., they can see the change before they import it.  Also, 
>> people will
>> learn to save their image first..  :)
>>   - We use a tool (BFAV?) that allows people to comment and possibly 
>> even
>> "vote" on each particular change.
>>   - The same tool could be used to improve a particular change based 
>> on others
>> comments, of course.
>>
>>
>
>
> To judge from the current process: People are not interested in 
> commenting on
> other changes. I am happy to if I get a *single* comment on a 
> changset. And
> I don't see how this is fundamentally differnt from BFAV: We already 
> have a stream
> of enhancements and a tool to view/load and vote on them. But nobody 
> cares.
>
> I think one thing to try would be to make it possible to commit 
> "trusted" developers
> more directly and faster... but I have not yet a good idea of how that 
> could work.
>
>     Marcus
>
>




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