From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v752.3) In-Reply-To: <5d375e920705102213l15d9289ehabdbf524003e3b90@mail.gmail.com> References: <5d375e920705102142q77c2263atc9d58ddf99de1f40@mail.gmail.com> <5d375e920705102213l15d9289ehabdbf524003e3b90@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed Message-Id: <1F719ABF-79ED-4FEC-9D4E-A111398AB892@telus.net> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Paul Lalonde Subject: Re: [9fans] Is IBM ThinkPad R60e notebook compatible with Plan9? Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 07:57:52 -0700 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 65478188-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On May 10, 2007, at 10:13 PM, Uriel wrote: > And that problem goes away if people actually puts their damned code > somewhere where people can see it, and they can 1) see it for > themselves 2) try it for themselves 3) fix/finish it by themselves It's a step harder than "just dropping it on sources". For all its utility, sources is no revision control system. Collaboration without (semi-)automatic change tracking and integration is an exercise in frustration, even with well-meaning submissions. The typical open source cvs process works well for patches, but is painful for reviewing substantial changes. In my day job we use Perforce. We have piles of (distributed) engineers banging on closely related code. Branching is a pain, but the integration process is smooth and easy, and we have automated review tools built on it. We tried subversion for a while, but found quickly that the reverse was done: branching was trivial, but integration was stunningly painful - you had to manually track what had been integrated and what hadn't; there were some scripts to automate some of that, but they were weak. SVN, and all the other open-source RCSs out there seem built for the "integrate infrequently everything in that branch" model, which (IM(ns)HO) doesn't match a less-distributed model so well. I don't want to collaborate with people when the cost of collaboration is continuous painful integrates. I'll take bug fixes easily enough, but it's hard to make forward progress on a small yet complex code base in a distributed space without the confidence afforded by rock-solid RCS tools. I wish we had a modern one on Plan9, but I'm not going to be the one to write it (although I started a Perforce filesystem, it's crufty and weak, and needs to be rebuilt now that I understand 9P better). Paul -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (Darwin) iD8DBQFGRIRxpJeHo/Fbu1wRAvtIAJ9/ptdlskCCar0OHYwwtxB3EOqvJACfUV1h FeLestJ4mhf+RWqitopPD50= =6U1Y -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----