On 8/14/06, Craig McClanahan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 8/14/06, Craig McClanahan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 8/14/06, Adam Winer < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Hey all,
> >
> > For some of our internal, non-open source work here at Oracle,
> > we're heavily depending on Trinidad (yay!). The catch is that,
> > at certain points, we need a stable branch to build off of and
> > apply only limited bug fixes so that internal work never gets
> > destabilized.
> >
> > What I'd like to do is create branches in the Subversion repository
> > for Trinidad code, with the following commitments:
> > - No proprietary, non-Apache code will *ever* be checked in to
> > such branches.
> > - No work will happen on these branches that has not *first*
> > been checked into trunk, with the possible exception of deeply
> > hacky bug patches that wouldn't be wanted on a trunk.
> >
> > In other words, this will still be public work, and never even
> > anything that could be construed as a fork in any way.
> >
> > Does this seem reasonable? Is it legit by Apache rules?
> >
> > All the alternatives I can think of are even less legit - e.g., we
> > could make an internal copy of the source code, but that just
> > reduces our exposure to the internal work and makes it less
> > straightforward for us to hew to the true code on the trunk.
>
>
> I went back and asked what we (Sun) do with various artifacts we depend on
> (such as bits from Tomcat). Back in CVS days (where a branch was pretty
> expensive), we did some Sun-specific tags when we grabbed a snapshot, but
> then we put that code in an internal mirror repository and did our builds
> against that (plus any point fixes that were necessary).
>
> In an Subversion world where branches like this would be really cheap, I
> don't see a problem as long as the other committers are OK with it. But
> hey, I work for a company that might like to be able to do this too :-). It
> definitely seems like something worth asking on the Incubator general list
> (so that it eventually ends up as guidance for new podlings) but perhaps
> more broadly as well because it certainly matters for existing projects as
> well.
>
> I'll ping a couple of appropriate aliases so we can get broader feedback
> on this.
>
OK, got some feedback, and it's going to be a -1 for two different
categories of reasons:
* Company private branches could potentially be
construed as being in conflict with Apache's
non-profit (501c3) status.
* Private stabilization branches are considered by
many folks to be bad engineering practice in the
first place. See below for more on the advice of
some of the Apache members.
The advice on the practice side is to consider why we go through this kind
of stabilization exercise in the first place. We don't want to get
destabilized by changes in the trunk code (or in a Maven snapshot we depend
on that suddenly changes underneath us). So, we try to control this change
by a snapshot where we control what goes in for a while, and then give back
the patches later.
The HTTPD project tries to deal with this by having the project itself
support two parallel development branches ... one for active development
(the trunk as we know it today in most projects), and one that receives
primarily bugfix support, and can serve as the dependency for downstream
users because the rate of change *is* controlled. In addition, the HTTPD
group does the even/odd version numbers that we see in Linux to help users
distinguish what kind of stability to expect.
If the Java projects we depended on all operated like this, we wouldn't find
the need for private stabilization branches so important. *Escpecially* if
the developers who work for the company producing the downstream product
were committers on the Java project being depended on, they could influence
the development practices of the project to ensure that an appropriate
degree of stability (including quick turnaround on x.y.z patch updates, if
needed) could be provided, just using the stable project branch.
I've started to see calls for this kind of thing in the user communities of
various projects (including recently from some folks frustrated that they
can't get bugfixes for MyFaces without buying in to all the functionality
changes in the trunk too). What would you think of working towards this
kind of goal for Trinidad (once we get to the initial product quality
release), and perhaps later trying to broaden it to MyFaces too?
This process - stable main releases, with instability only at major
releases - is exactly how we developed ADF back at Oracle,
and exactly what I'd like to see for Trinidad with respect to any
changes that break backwards compatibility. Trinidad already
has the concept of an exposed, stable API, in the trinidad-api
JAR, and an internal, unstable API, in the trinidad-impl JAR.
So, in the long run, I couldn't agree more. I also do want to broaden
this to MyFaces - it's a source of great personal concern that
there is no stated rule in MyFaces that any API can be depended
on from one release to any other.
My issue right now is what to do in the short term, where:
- We Trinidad committers have to make changes to Trinidad to get out
of the incubator
- Necessarily, there isn't yet a stable 1.0 release (because
we're a new podling).
- But Oracle still has to have some level of stability for internal
development.
So, I can totally with the Apache folks that it's poor development
practice long-term, and I would never want to stick to the approach - I
want Oracle using *real* versions of Trinidad, not some hacked
up Oracle-only version.
But it leaves me in a conundrum for what to do right now,
because I have to wear both the Oracle hat and the Trinidad hat.
The simplest answer is to come up with something that is
not company-specific, so it doesn't get Apache into non-profit
legal trouble, yet addresses these real needs. How about
a basic "monthly stabilization branch" that anyone can pull
off of, and has no particular tie to any one company? And
a long-term strategy of eliminating the need for such branches
once we have a real set of releases?
What would others say to something basic like that?
-- Adam
I'm also going to do some thinking about this with regard to Shale (again,
need to get to a stable release first, but that shouldn't be an infinite
amount of time any more :-).
-- Adam
>
>
Craig
Craig
>
>
