Need to do something

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Fri Oct 14 03:12:01 UTC 2005


stéphane ducasse wrote:
> Sure this is what we are doing with Morphic enh (we trust eddie's  
> speedup, we trust romain service architecture, we trust  PLMrefactoring 
> and accept that they may break a bit)
> we just pay attention that the system at the end still work.

The problem with this "trust model" is that you are still standing 
squarely in the way of those people making independent progress. And 
like it or not, you aren't the expert in this area, and if you aren't 
who are you to say whether to extend the trust to that person? That's 
exactly what gets us into the mess - there is a "well meant" idea which 
is then poorly executed because nobody with actual firsthand knowledge 
is involved in the process.

Secondly, (because I know this would be your next point ;-) you need to 
give maintainers some time to react. I know that you are going to say 
now, namely: "but we waited two years and nobody did anything!!!" But 
that's not true because we *don't* have maintainers. We only have 
maintainers for those things that actually packagized, and here it is 
the rare exception (if it ever happened) that these things get 
completely forgotten. And yes, this can happen, and yes, in such a 
situation one needs to react. But it is still an exceptional situation 
and you are now effectively operating under "exceptional rules" all the 
time ;-)

>> That's exactly the point, isn't it? If you want to do that, e.g.,  
>> personally ensure that everything gets integrated, then your only  
>> option is to take ownership of all the code. But then please don't  
>> complain, it's been your choice ;-) Alternatively, your only option  
>> is to believe in an economy that scales and the only way to get  there 
>> is to stand back and delegate. Your task should then be to  *find* 
>> people who do the work and who feel responsible, not *do*  the work (I 
>> think Goran understands that).
> 
> 
> This is what we have been trying to do, but who want/can want to that?

You did? I fail to see any traces of that process :-( What I have seen 
is requests for people to "do the slave labour", but I have yet to see 
any attempt to delegate actual responsibility. Even with Ken and Goran's 
  latest attempt it stays again in the "inner circle" of people who do 
have commit rights to "basic Squeak" to begin with.

>> The point is that the system is too big for you on a personal level  
>> and that it's too big for anyone and that even looking at  subsystems 
>> like Morphic it's daunting task. You need to get this  smaller to get 
>> people involved but to get people involved you have  to trust them.
> 
> Exact this is what we are doing. So may be these people should have  
> access to the "update stream"

I don't actually think so. These people should have access to their 
packages, that's what they really need.

> But you saw what happened when diego started to work on Morphic,  impara 
> got afraid and said that they would do a fast release (btw  this will 
> become the ultimate joke I have against the Beeper  beep :)).

You make this sound as if we deliberately delayed the release to make 
sure that Diego's changes don't get in. But if I remember correctly, 
then the real killer argument in 3.9a was that when you asked for help 
to integrate these changes, you didn't get any feedback. That has very 
little to do with Impara.

> OK excellent! We have no problem to see you working on integrated  your 
> stuff on 3.9a but your attitude certainly lets marcus think that  you
> were not interested. So this is a good news. Are you commited to  
> maintain, integrate your package in 3.9a?

I think I can speak for everyone involved in the ToolBuilder work (which 
isn't just me) that we are committed to maintain and enhance ToolBuilder 
for the foreseeable time (btw, we still need help with MVC support!). 
And we will certainly work with any (existing or potential) customer to 
help you get started and work with ToolBuilder.

However, we won't write your code. Don't expect that we suddenly run 
around in the whole system and rewrite every class to use ToolBuilder. 
Not our code, remember? As far as I am concerned you are free to 
completely ignore ToolBuilder.

> Excellent news. So we added it on the list of the stuff not to let  die 
> because nobody pay attention.
> 
> Marcus will be more than happy I can tell you. So let us know when  you 
> want to start. Doug has the account info
> and as soon as marcus arrive in Chile and we get script 6 load you  can 
> integrate your changes.
> 
> Again WHY DID NOT YOU SEND US AN EMAIL TO SAY THAT?

If you have any issues with ToolBuilder integration you should talk to 
Brian Brown and not yell at me. Brian is the appointed team leader with 
the specific task to make sure this stuff gets integrated. Beyound that 
you may want to talk to the appointed Coordinator (which would be Cees) 
if you feel that Brian isn't helpful. I don't see any reason why you 
yell at me - I have never promised to work on integration, I have only 
promised to work on the framework. Which is precisely what I have done, 
and will do in the future.

Besides that, have you ever asked at the dedicated Toolbuilder mailing 
list? Has Marcus ever mentioned that he's got problems to anyone? I 
don't see any messages towards that end. Why do you yell at me?

Besides that, I don't see any time pressure for ToolBuilder integration. 
As soon as it is available people can decide whether they want to use it 
or not. I don't see any reason to force anybody to do that and neither 
do I see any reason to force integration.

> Come on andreas. I found that quite low level remark. You never payed  
> any attention to  the work done by the Morphic Cleaning Project else
> with a bit of steering they would have made great stuff. The only way  
> to get people commited to do something is to pay attention to what  they 
> are doing.

There are two reasons why I haven't paid any attention: First is that in 
my eyes mechanical rewriting is completely useless. If you want to 
rewrite code to clean it up, fine, but that's got nothing to do with 
mechanically replacing all references to "foo at: 1" with "foo first". 
That kind of cleanup is simply useless and I won't spend one second to 
look at it. If you want to clean up something then take a functional 
entity (say PLM) and do that. That's the kind of refactoring I can 
approve of but most of what was done wasn't that kind.

Second, I *don't* claim any ownership about Morphic. I'm done with it, 
over, out. If you want to refactor, refactor. I'm fine with that. And 
since my time is limited too, I don't look at these refactorings.

>> Put differently: It is *my* choice whether I want "my  shitty 
>> code" to be rewritten, not yours.
> 
> Except if the code is getting in the way of everybody and if lot of  
> people propose fixes and nobody pay attention to it and there is no  
> maintainer.
> I think that you are playing with concepts here but not morphic reality.

Again, I wasn't talking about Morphic specifically, I was talking about 
code ownership in general. I actually agree that if there's a problem in 
the way of everyone and if there's no maintainer then something needs to 
be done, no matter what.

Cheers,
   - Andreas



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