Fractal Development (was Re: [Vm-dev] VM Automated builds update)

[Igor Stasenko]

On 17 March 2011 23:46, Casey Ransberger <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think I just have to crash this thread; renaming to be polite about it.
>
> Distributed SCM, thrown around a lot on the list. Continuous integration is a pretty obvious win I think (if you can convince me that it isn't I'll buy you a whole case of beer.) So I'll just look at source control.
>
> It works for the Linux kernel. In particular, it makes it possible for a *single individual* to handle integration for the whole kernel, by farming out the detail work to "trusted lieutenants," who in turn do the same for still others. Code starts flowing all over the place, and if it's useful it usually makes it's way back up the tree.
>
> Does the "single individual" part scream Smalltalk at anyone else, or is it just me?
>
> Think of it as a fractal development model wherein you have much testing and vetting at many levels before e.g. Torvalds ever sees it your commit.
>
> Some folks seem worried that a decentralized SCM will encourage more forks. I would maintain that forking is a social behavior, and it's unrelated to SCM.
>

Indeed. I am personally against forking. Splitting precious human
resources , wasting energy on holy wars.. It is much better to work
together.

> I think we will always have a core of people who "own" pieces of Squeak as a consequence of some combination of meritorious conduct, passion for the technology, etc. There's no need to ditch official releases to accommodate a distributed SCM. Frankly MC is already a hair closer to Git than it is to CVS in some respects, and all the damned thing really needs to get all this goodness rolling (on a technical level anyway) is branching functionality.
>
> Branch+Merge != Fork
>
> FWIW, the point is making branching and *especially* merging easier. When merging is easy, you have a force that acts *against* divergent enterprises.
>
> How many forks are there of Squeak? Okay, now how many forks are there of the Linux kernel?
>
> Is the orthogonality obvious yet?
>

It was obvious. From very starting.

I stress again, that things which i doing is not fork. It is my
contribution (on behalf of Pharo team) to VM development.

The maximum divergence which i can expect to be needed by Pharo is
building/packaging VM with Pharo icon. :)

In future i can go deeper (if time allow) and change/fix some stuff.
But it can be folded back to mainline at any moment (of course if it
prove to be useful).

It is clear , that none of Pharoers want to privatise VM or someone's
work. Our vision is simple: spread the knowledge, get a critical mass,
make VM development open and contribution easy and without extra
administration cost.

In is in same spirit as Squeak trunk does: anyone can push the changes
to inbox without asking, and core devs can push directly to trunk.
So if you look at gitorious it reflects the same process model, just
using git as a tool for that.


-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.