[squeak-dev] Mantis usage rules du jour

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Sat Feb 23 14:14:05 UTC 2013


On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 12:33:14AM -0800, Colin Putney wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 10:12 PM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> > No ceremony at all worries me. Call me Captain Slow (cf James May) but I
> > like procedures. They're recipes for maintaining sanity over time.
> >
> 
> Well, it's not quite "no ceremony," we're aiming for "no more ceremony than
> necessary." Here's the description of the way it's supposed to work now:
> 
> http://squeakboard.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/a-new-community-development-model/

This is really a key point. It did not seem like a big thing at the time,
but with the benefit of hindsight I now think of the Andreas' community
development model as perhaps his most important contribution to Squeak.
I go back and reread his posting from time to time, along with the back
to the future paper (http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/OOPSLA.Squeak.html) just
to remind myself of the basics.

That said, I think that Mantis also plays an important role. Basically it
is there for issues that cannot be quickly resolved on the mailing list,
or that require some longer term collective memory for the community.

I honestly thought our Mantis system had pretty well died off a few years
ago, but I kept on using it to record various VMMaker issues that could
not be immediately resolved. There are issues like this that for various
reasons may require years to bring to conclusion, and it is also helpful
to have a record of those issues beyond what is found in email postings
and Monticello commit comments.

A good example of such an issue that was just recently updated is this one:

  http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=6828

And an even better example is this one, which was not very important
at the time the issue was logged, but which will be very important
a few years later as the various VMs move to 64-bit platforms:

  http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7237

> 
> The development of Squeak 3.11 basically ground to halt because of
> excessive procedure, and this new model was an attempt to resuscitate it.
> It worked!

I agree, and I strongly urge a balanced approach. Use Mantis where it
makes sense, but don't waste time on procedure for the sake of procedure.

Dave

> 
> It's possible that we have swung too far in the other direction, but I
> haven't seen anything that makes me think so. Are there specific problems
> you want to solve, or is it more of a general unease at the
> loosey-goosey-free-for-all?
> 



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