[CF-Devel] About CVS server stability.

[Tim Rightnour]

On 02-Mar-02 Yann Chachkoff wrote:
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      Now I also disagree when you say that it is the "only way to really work out 
     
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      the bugs" - patches do exist and are commonly used in other projects when 
     
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      submitting new stuff (that also explains why sourceforge has a "patches" 
     
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      service). Why are we unable to use them more widely ?
     
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      I repeat again what I've said a lot: if we do not agree on a clear 
     
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      submission/test/update protocol, the problems will get worse and will *not* 
     
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      solve by themselves.
     
     
IMHO, alot of this is semi-rediculous.

1) Branching.  I wholeheartedly agree with Mark.  If we are going to have
branches, they need to be stable branches.  I don't want to write code, and
then backport it to the "stable" CVS trunk.  If someone wants there to be a
stable branch, somebody needs to step up, and claim responsibility for it, and
do the work needed to maintain it.  And then they need to be prepared for the
fact that some of us aren't going to backport our code to it.

2) It's CVS.  It's a live development copy.  I don't understand why people seem
to have it in thier heads that CVS is allways going to be stable, and happy. 
If you aren't willing to put up with the fact that from time to time, CVS may
have code in it that makes things worse than they were before, then don't run a
non-release version.  If you want your server to be on the bleeding edge, you
need to be prepared to bleed.

3) Patches are only useful for shaking out bugs if you have a critical mass of
users.  We don't have that many servers out there.  If none of them run the
patch, it doesn't get tested.


Don't get me wrong..  I don't think we should just throw code willy nilly into
the server, nor do I think we should be stuffing wholly untested code into it,
or nasty hacks.  But lets have some scope here.  This is a game.  We aren't
being paid to work on it.  It's not *fun* to have to backport all your work N
times.  It's not fun to have to write a test suite for everything you do.  If
I screw up CVS, the electric arm doesn't fly through the wall and kill someone.

However.. just about every time anyone has committed anything larger than a
bugfix in the past few months, someone turns around and threatens to quit.  I'm
truly terrfied that eventually, we will reach this stage where everything has
to be proposed in a formal proposal, given 9 months of discussion, and has to
be unanimously agreed upon before hitting the tree with a host of crazy
regression suites.  Thats NOT FUN.  I want to have fun, and write code.  I
don't want to be embroiled in political process for every line of code I write.
Maybe we do need a formal procedure, but I implore whoever writes it, to
consider that we aren't writing space shuttle navigation code, it's a video
game.

---
Tim Rightnour <
     
     root at garbled.net
     
     >
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