[squeak-dev] A New Community Development Model

Norbert Hartl norbert at hartl.name
Thu Jul 2 07:02:20 UTC 2009


Hi,

this proposal is really a step towards openness. I'm glad you added
the inbox to your original proposal. Without that it wasn't really
welcoming work from others. 

I still don't think that Monticello is the right way to go. It doesn't
really manage changes. I can so easily overwrite a change that was
applied before that it is hard to use. You can argue that you have to
be careful anyway and that you can merge. You are right but still it
is hard to use. Another thing is pharo. All of my contribution to the
image I did in pharo because I never saw much a chance to do this in
squeak. Now it can be doable. And doing something in pharo and not be
able to do it in squeak at the same time strikes me really. Using 
always Monticello with full source compare will prevent applying fixes
from one team to the other. The sources are just more different every
day.

For the new setup to work well there is still one thing to do IMHO. 
Sooner or later the bug tracker should help in organizing and 
documenting changes. But mantis is in an awful state. There are nearly
2200 tickets in the database. Coming from the outside it looks like
really nobody cares. A bug tracker with less tickets and tickets that
give an overview what is going on right now is essential. Maybe not
for the gurus and old timers but for everyone else (e.g. me). I would
like to propose a cleaning initiative of mantis. I would expect a lot
of these old bugs to be obsolete by now. So a quick check if this bug
is still valid can be done. And then if it is invalid you just need
to close it. 

Norbert




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