Csound is a medium sized project now, but still not a large one, and there 
are only a few active developers. I think our problems would mostly go away 
if the following policies were observed:

People are free to add things, fix bugs, reformat code, etc. without 
discussion.

People should not rework the contributions of others without discussion.

People will not remove things that have been released.

Regards,
Mike



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Erik de Castro Lopo" 
To: 
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 10:24 PM
Subject: [Cs-dev] Thoughts on revision control and developer interaction 
issues


> Hi all,
>
> I am trying to bring a reasoned approach to solve the issues that
> recently caused one of our developers to come close to quitting
> work on Csound.
>
> These issues are (as I understand them):
>
>  i1) People changing or reformatting code while others are currently
>      working on it.
>  i2) People moving code within the tree while others are currently
>      working on that code.
>  i3) People disagreeing about what should or should not go
>      into Csound.
>  i4) People deleting code before getting agreement from the other
>      developers that said code should be deleted.
>
> If there are other issues that I didn't list here, now is the time
> to bring them up, either here on the list or in private email to me.
>
> Issues i3 and i4 are problems with communication. The only thing that
> I can really suggest here is that people use the mailing list to
> communicate. Policy might help as well. One policy that we probably
> should have is that no code or functionality gets deleted without
> some sort of a pre-defined approval process. This may also be
> appropriate for new functionality.
>
> Issues i1) and i2) above are largely due to the use of CVS. Other more
> modern revision control systems track and deal with changes of these
> kinds so much better than CVS. The problem with some of these other
> RC systems is that the really good ones (SVN is good, but not really
> good) don't play nice with windows (and as Anthony Kozar points out
> Mac OS9).
>
> I have used CVS, SVN, GUN Arch, Bzr, Perforce, Visual Source(un)safe
> Aegis and probably some that I have forgotten. RC systems like GNU Arch,
> Bzr and Mercurial (and probablay others) are designed for the kind of
> distributed development that Csound uses. These systems have far better
> branching than CVS or SVN provides and more importantly better automatic
> (within reason) merging between branches and tracking of those merges
> than either CVS or SVN.
>
> Ignoring the issues of windows and OS9 interaction, GNU Arch and Bzr
> (both of which I am currently using) would solve most of the problems
> related to issues i1 and i2.
>
> To me, this suggests that some of the more adventurous developers may
> want to move to one of these more advanced RC systems to make
> interaction easier and less painful. In order not to freeze out the
> OS9 and windows developers, this new RC system would have to work
> pretty much in parallel with the existing CVS which gives us a new
> problem; how to sync between CVS and the new parallel RC system. For
> most of the more advanced systems, the CVS to new RC system would be
> relatively painless leaving only the issue of moving changes from the
> new system back to CVS.
>
> At the moment, the only solution I can think that will allow changes
> to move from the new system to CVS is if the CVS users agreed to a
> pre-set weekly/fortnightly/whatever 12 hour period when they should
> not have any pending changes. This would allow file renames and moves
> to happen with a reasonable guarantee that none of the CVS users
> toes would get stepped on. Once the changes have been migrated to CVS,
> a "cvs update" in each user's CVS work area should bring them up to
> date.
>
> So, my questions:
>
>  - Are people interested in working to resolve these issues?
>  - Would the parallel use of CVS and SomeOtherRC tool help?
>  - Are the more adventurous developers willing to do the hard
>    work of using SomeOtherRC and the exta work of syncing
>    changes back to CVS?
>
> Comments please.
>
> Cheers,
> Erik
> -- 
> +-----------------------------------------------------------+
>  Erik de Castro Lopo
> +-----------------------------------------------------------+
> "Every time you get a windows programmer asking you to write some
> ass-backward workaround, think of it as a crack junkie asking you
> to help stuff his pipe because his hands are too shaky."
> -- Conrad Parker
>
>
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> 




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http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642
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