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

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

Ralf Hemmecke <address@hidden> writes:

| > 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.

we are talking of Silver, right?

| 
| >       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?

you end up with N people having N branches, when in fact they want 1
common "true" live source to branch off.

But, I'm not going to insist since the idea of a common source
code that people can develop from and check-in lively is alien here.  
I have enough on the plate.  I'll finish build-improvements.  People
take what they want and I'll probably fork.

What I've seen with build-improvements is that people try it and find
problem, they propose fixes and if the fixes are correct they check
them in and everybody has it immediately.  The only time they have to
wait for me, is for review.  But if we have more "authorized" reviewers,
they would not have to wait for one single person.

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

I think everything is happy about that; and there is no discussion.

[...]

| 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.

There is a problem.  If Tim develops his stuff on one hand, and /trunk
develops its own way,  we have a mess.  If I'm the only one in charge
of trunk, we have a problem as I said above (only one person as
central authority is a serious failure mode point).

| 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.

In a sense, we would have a fork  but not calling it that way.  Why not do
the real thing and be clear it?

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

I'm expecting to see more "Waldek"s coming in.  If there must be only
one Axiom source, then I would like to see their fixes go in as
quickly as possible (after clear review, that is).  And I would like
to see those changes spread as quickly as possible.  Also, you should
get in the habit of crediting developers responsabilities -- they should
commit themselves.  There are lots of things you learn that way :-)

-- Gaby