[squeak-dev] a little more due process

keith keith_hodges at yahoo.co.uk
Tue Feb 16 22:28:53 UTC 2010


>
> IRC is clearly deemed to be a medium inferior to the mailing list in  
> this community. Forcing your ideas on us of what the development  
> process should be hasn't worked before, and is unlikely to work in  
> the future.

I did not force anyone, I wrote a proposal and you subscribed to it.

You are the ones who forced things by instituting the trunk process  
which is unusable.

> You do have great ideas, it's just unfortunate they sometimes are  
> not aligned with what the community at large wants.

The community at large will now get what it is given. Yet another fork  
subscribing to the push model, where you push your changes into the  
forks that only you are interested in.

The pull model, is now becoming available for Cuis2, where you can  
subscribe to what you want or need, and publish changes to your image  
in a form that others can pull if they want to.

>
>> This mess is a mess of the board's making, no one else's, and it  
>> happened because of lack of "due process".
>
> The "messy" trunk process was indeed established to allow  
> contribution without much explicit coordination. It may not be what  
> you like, but it seems to suit this community well. And that's what  
> matters in the end, IMHO.


Why can no one distinguish between a technical point and a  
philosophical point. The mess I referred to is the political mess.

We established the philosophical basis of the old 3.11 project as  
being that of valuing and harnessing everyone's contributions, we did  
this in response to the pharo team's approach, which only accepts  
perfect contributions that make it past the 2 maintainers.

The board overturned this, by not valuing everyone contributions. You  
decided to only value contributions that can be integrated into trunk  
"now", not contributions that need a bit of work, contributions that  
will mature over time, or contributions of a revolutionary nature  
which might break things if they are not quite perfect. (Morphic 3.0  
Rio etc)

The trunk process is now the same as the pharo process, something we  
knew we didn't want. It has a single point maintainer, and my  
contributions are not acceptable, and they are not technically usable.  
My contributions will not be good enough to add to trunk as they are  
they need a place to gestate, and be worked upon by a group before  
they would be ready.

Technically speaking trunk is not messy enough, because you cant do  
things like replacing Morphic, or refactoring the sources changes  
mechanism in trunk. You would have to do it offline, and when it is  
perfect it could be integrated, but achieving the integration is  
tricky because trunk is a moving target.

Sure Andreas is superhuman and can do amazing stuff in trunk that  
works perfectly and doesn't ever break anything, but I cant, I need to  
work offline and integrate things when they are ready. Trunk is too  
controlled and focused to enable that, you are imposing a monolithic  
development model on my that I can't work with.

If I recall the community actually wanted a minimal kernel image with  
which they can build what they want.

Keith
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