Re: [Axiom-developer] RE: gcl-2.6.8pre on MAC OSX 10.2

[Ralf Hemmecke]

> I'm very happy to see Tim is making changes more visible now, than waiting
> for ages before seeing light. The main reason I originally volunteered to
> maintain Silver is that I do believe in "live sources". Tim suggested
> at the time that he did not have time do maintain too many branches.
> It therefore was a natural thing for me to volunteer to take on the
> job.  Now, if Tim has more time to do the job, I'm all for it.

> However, I see practical issue here:  
>
>   (1) first, we should not have one single person as authority to
>       commit changes.

We are speaking here _only_ of the changes that go to the next Gold 
release.

>       Every contributor we grant write access should
>       commit its own changes to silver/trunk/whatever it is
>       called.  That way, we don't have to wait that only a single
>       person has time and do the job.

Why not first develop on a branch as you do and then (if public review 
was long enough and (most) axiom developers agree that it should go to 
the next gold release) have Tim do the actual merge to silver?

I am so happy that Tim opened his pre-gold to the public so that we can 
see what is going to be gold.

>   (2) second, he review should be public, instead of being done in
>       private.

But now we _do_ it in public. You are watched by many people on 
build-improvements.

>       This helps people to learn possible obscure cases of
>       the system -- instead of the only-one-who-knows has a
>       conversation with himself and commit. 
>       The changes should be sent to the list instead of Tim.

Of course, to the list.

>   (3) third, I'm having diffculty in following the reasoning that,
>       most people would develop patches against the SVN repo,
>       they will see their patches applied by someone else to a repo
>       under a different SCM, and wait a day and then copied back, to
>       the SVN repo just to see their changes.  That does not strike me
>       as efficient.
>       I consider that an extraodinary waste of time and resources.

I somehow must admit that this is probably a good point. But nobody 
forbids to commit anything on sorceforge except to the /silver directory.

I must say, it was a quite wise idea of Bill to create /silver as an 
exact copy of axiom--silver--1. View it as the opportunity to see 
(read-only) Tim's commits in SVN format.

In fact, there is no problem if /trunk is kept as a central place that 
is under Gaby's responsibility. And although I would find it sad, but if 
/trunk and /silver do not become one in the near future, there is no 
problem as long as it is clearly described which directory contains what.

I share your efficiency considerations, though. But up to now, it wasn't 
a big problem.

Ralf