Switching from CVS to Subversion: test svn repo available

Chris Shoemaker c.shoemaker at cox.net
Mon Oct 24 20:37:15 EDT 2005


On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 04:48:22PM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Quoting Chris Shoemaker <c.shoemaker at cox.net>:
> 
> PS: I still don't agree with your premise that the gnucash project needs
> to radically change its development processes in order to increase the
> number of fringe developers.  Historically GnuCash has had about a half
> dozen active developers with commit access and maybe a dozen fringe
> devs who send in patches.  This has historically worked fine.  Also
> historically there has been turnover as fringe devs become core-devs
> by proving that they can work within the gnucash development process,

Maybe that's a reasonable criteria for giving someone commit access to
the OneTrueBuild.  But, that's not reasonable criteria for giving
someone access to convenient SCM.  That's like saying: We love for
people to join us on this trip across country.  We know the best way
is this train we're on, so we see if they can keep up for a while on
bicycles, and if they can, we let them on the train.

I've spent more time refreshing out-of-tree patches that I have
actually developing code! (ok, not really, but a LOT of time, it's a
PITA.)  It's pretty off-putting.  I think, ideally, *anyone* who wants
to should be on the SCM train.  Let everybody go as fast as we know
how.  If people think it's best to require some test of endurance in
order to write to the OneTrueBuild, then so be it.  Personally, I
think code should stand on its own, but whatever.

> and old devs leave as they find other projects to work on.  The main
> issue is that ALL the core devs got burned out after 1.8 and there
> weren't any fringe devs to pull up in the ranks.  

You make it sound like you believe that the derth of fringe devs is
some random, inexplicable circumstance.  Surely you have some theory
(or maybe knowledge) for *why* a large, popular project went from a
healthy dev rate to barely alive?

> Since then we've added a couple new committers, one who left and the
> other who is active but focused... differently.  We were also
> discussing adding one more core dev to the mix.  But I don't think
> that changing the way gnucash's code is maintained would really
> change the number of people submitting patches.

Is that a "I don't think" because I think the cause-effect
relationships are actually such-and-such, or "I don't think" because
I'm not feeling optimistic today.

Or are you convinced that the fundamental impediment to new devs is
code complexity?

Or do you just want to agree to disagree on this?

-chris


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