[Axiom-developer] Re: trunk

[Ralf Hemmecke]

> That is great.  What I would propose is that one you commit those changes to
> branches/daly, we sync it with trunk and we continue with trunk.  That way,
> you pending work is not disrupted and people are given sufficient notice of
> what will happen.

Very good, Gaby. I was about to suggest the same.

In fact, the biggest problem is not the many SCMs we have. The problem
is that different people have different views on how Axiom should develop.

We have gold/silver/experimental branches, but seemingly not everyone
understands the same thing when he says gold or silver.

I think we all agree, that the current Gold is axiom--main--1--patch-50
(and I don't know whether this has another version number like 3.0 or so).

Silver is something that should be "reasonably stable". Maybe we require
that is should at least always compile. However, it might contain things
that do not work.

Currently, Tim decides what goes into Silver (which meanwhile became
sourceforge:trunk).

People should be able do checkout Silver and investigate whether it
compiles on their machines. Whether they find bugs, etc.

At some point in time we agree that Silver is sufficiently stable so
that it can simply be *called* "Gold". Now a snapshot of Silver will be
moved to sourceforge:gold/Axiom-4.0 and development is going on at
sourceforge:trunk.

Many people have there private or public branches (which should branch
from Silver). Development there is completely up to them. If those
people think that some idea is ready to be included to Silver, they
should announce it and provide a patch or command how to get the
changeset into Silver. (In my opinion the patch should be a diff against
the current Silver and not against Gold, but maybe I just have not
enough worked in such big projects.

Before changes go to Silver, Tim has to approve them. (Actually, to
remove a bottleneck, we should introduce some voting system, whether a
particular patch should go into Silver or not.)

Could you give your opinion on whether that development model would be
good for you? Please, I don't want to hear somebody blaming somebody
else that he is doing things wrongly. We should be pragmatic and try to
figure out a way that each of us can live with. We have not enough
manpower that we can affort to work against each other.

> | >  * create a branch gold that contains the mature Gold version
> | 
> | Frankly, I'm not even sure what this would mean. But I am sure that
> | creating a "branch" named "Gold" in SVN is certain to cause confusion
> | and havoc. Gold lives in Arch, currently --patch-50. 
>
> Having many versions of Axiom floating around causes greater confusion.
> If people can get silver from one place, they should also be able to get gold
> from that same place.

I agree with Gaby. Let's get rid of Arch. Even Tim has replaced it by 
GIT. Why should be people bother with Arch. Make it simple and let (the 
next Gold) also live at sourceforge. It will anyway since it will be a 
snapshot of silver.

I wouldn't care much about --patch-50. Let it live in Arch, if it must. 
Copying it to sourceforge isn't worth the trouble and just makes the 
archive bigger.

Ralf