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Re: Great (and funny) Linus' speach about GIT [message #13497 is a reply to message #13175]

Fri, 11 January 2008 09:43

mr_ped
Messages: 825
Registered: November 2005
Location: Czech Republic - Praha

Experienced Contributor

"Why do not you just sit and start coding?"

I thought he was listing things he already *did*.
(probably not clean enough to be merged back into official upp to just send you testing package)

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... about mirrored svn, mercurial (and whatever you like, I think after the SVN is finally synced with uvs2 (great!), this is no more problem of UPP crew, anybody can create whatever repository likes, and sync with synced SVN ... souds ugly? It will be ugly. But there's not much more there can be done about it without radical change in upp core team, i.e. defining new philosophy/policies of maintaining upp project, choosing the tools and migrating from uvs there).

As I wrote above, Mirek tends to change core sources a lot, he definitely likes to refactor code anytime he doesn't feel happy about it. (that's great actually)

So whenever you fork from official upp, do your own changes on let's say private branch in svn, if it takes you more than 2-3 months, you are facing ugly task of merging back to recent upp, especially if you don't merge continuously trough those 2 months.
If you work on something quite independent, this is not a real deal, if you work on something like that X11 DHctrl, it will probably make the process of "finishing" package much harder, as you are trying to hit a moving target.
Merging continuously is something what makes your base for that experiment (potentially) unstable and (for sure) "moving", and while upp is usually quite stable after refactoring, you may stop feeling safe.. if you don't feel safe, you may start to look for (your) bugs in upp code .. you will lose time, confidence, and get worser code in the end.
(just read some basics about Test Driven Development and the reasoning behind it, most of the TDD advocates say the improved confidence improves everything... coding speed, code quality, you name it. From my limited experience with TDD I can only agree with that, the confidence and ability to focus on single problem had earthshaking effect on my laziness and productivity, which has been quite low recent years on my side)

Also keep in mind Mirek does not announce what he is working on, so many bigger inner refactorings happen pretty much overnight in uvs2 without any hint they will appear. Had you finished your package on evening, wanting to give it another test and morning and send to Mirek as finished? It may be well obsolete at morning. Very Happy

All these apply big time only to upp core development itself, Mirek's notice about giving more (but carefully) write permissions will lead to "low number of core developers", just as I said before. This is not a horrible thing, after all the upp has been like this for years and it does progress forward, so it's certainly a working philosophy/policy.
But it may look like some personal project for years due to this (and not like a serious development platform ... and while upp has got it's share of problems if you want it to exactly fit your biz needs, Mirek's own living proves the platform *is* viable and serious for commercial use already).

If you are doing work outside of core, you are usually bound only to upp API, and while that one does change quite a lot too, you can usually "port" your obsolete source to fresh upp version within minutes or hours, so you can work on stable base, and merge with latests only sometimes. Especially if you work with old stable parts of API, you are unlikely to hit any of these things I write above about.

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