Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Nick Roberts]

 > Is anyone trying to tell me, that switching to some hip new version
 > control system is going to make people start applying the patches that
 > currently sit around in this mailing list for weeks?

With GDB, developers who submit many patches are generally given
write access.  Those who only occasionally submit patches have their
patch committed by the maintainer approving it.  So IMHO Tom Tromey,
Ken Mannheimer etc should have write access and others should be able
to approve a patch.

 > Or that when there is a shiny new bug tracker, people will suddenly
 > start fixing all the bugs that get reported?

They don't get fixed but they become more traceable.  My recent bug report
about vc-dired wouldn't get lost and it could be marked as a duplicate or
related to the report Alexandru Harsanyi made about vc-workfile-unchanged-p in
mid December 2007.  ESR appears to have gone now, but with a tracker he could
review the bugs listed under VC when he returns and might choose to fix any
that caught his eye.

It's just unfortunate that RMS sees a bug list as preventing a release rather
than a database for recording new bugs and reviewing existing ones.

 > I actually do think a bug tracker will be useful; I just think the
 > problems of Emacs development lie in other places rather than the
 > tools it uses. 

They're separate issues, let's not blur them.

 > I don't care about the version control system.

I think there could also be benefits here with merging branches, changesets,
moving files etc. but it clearly also isn't a silver bullet.

 > For me, the problems can be summed up in the fact that the number of
 > people willing to write emails (and yes, that includes this one) about
 > what should be done vastly outweighs the number of people willing to
 > actually do anything.
 > 
 > I was trying not to comment on this pointless thread, but I've failed.

It's been unproductive but probably not pointless.

-- 
Nick                                           http://www.inet.net.nz/~nickrob