Heroine Virtual Ltd. wrote:
> LMA has briefly loaned dual Opteron systems over the years and allowed
> development
> on new hardware to proceed until prices became more affordable. The
> "vital" part of the
> assistance is as much AMD, IBM, HP, Compaq, Digital, and Pioneer as it
> is LMA.
Cool, does that mean some of those companies are lending you equipment?
>> The safety in OSS is it's transparency IMHO.
> The fact that anyone can download source code and "taint" it is hardly
> a safety feature. If you
> really want transparency, you need to restrict who downloads it and
> works on it without community involvement.
I can understand this for your own personal copy, and very much
appreciate that you don't want others tainting your copy. But I
consider that someone who /'download your source code and "taint"'/s it
is only tainting their own personal copy and not yours. Transparency
doesn't need to be in restricting the download, but the upload.
I personally would be absolutely stoked if you made your development
branch open, as that would allow us to see first hand what changes you
are accepting from us, and also what you are developing yourself. I
cannot see how making your development branch visible allows us to taint
your work if you don't allow upload to your repository...
The thing that making your repository visible does achieve is reducing
work, both for yourself and us. I'd rather send a patch to you knowing
its easily applies to your current devel branch than to your last
release code, as that way you can try it out without having to muck
around making it apply.
Letting us see your development branch makes it much easier to sync your
repository with ours as we can selectively review each commit in your
repository and commit it, (allowing the developers in the community to
spend more time scanning for bugs than grouping hunks of diffs together
into committable patches..)
This would also assist in bug reports that you take interest in, if our
repositories are somewhat synched, then when a user says "it's been
stuffed since r???, you could easily see the commit in your repo that
relates to this, and more quickly fix the bug if you happen to care
about it...
Also, the point that the original poster was describing was that of
seeing where development is going. Take for instance the OpenGL. I
recall it being discussed on the mailing list prior to the 2.1 release.
I'm guessing this possibly sparked you to implement this idea. If it
turned out that both you and a developer here had started working out
the OpenGL feature but in different way's, then there's a lot of work
wasted!!!
Another point is that Major releases of cinelerra could then officially
be declared bug tested by the community... and stable, (as matches the
release cycle of most other programs!) rather than a major release
indicating a new "buggy state".
Along with all these cases, I also consider that opening up your branch
would stop the discouragement of community developers (both new and
old.) I know I've often been put off of developing extra stuff in
cinelerra as I would get concerned that you wouldn't accept it, and the
new feature is only making the CV version diverge from yours... If you
had your repository open, then new developers are less likely to feel
that there contributions are not worthless...
So all in all, opening up your development branch has a whole heap of
positives. The only negatives for developing in private that I could
possibly see are:
1. You are a private person who needs to remain anonymous, (ip
address, commit rates relate to work laziness.. etc. could be
giving yourself away??)
2. We start working on what your working on, but heading in a
different direction, (which you wouldn't like)... easily fixed by
not pushing your VERY lastest branch.
3. You are developing for a company that likes to have the newer
features, and the community only gets these features at a delayed
time... not very good for fixing bugs...as bug reports should
ideally spring up soon after the bug is pushed into the
repository, not at the "major release".
4. (You / Some the people involved in the Official version) need your
identity to be private. Opening up the repository, could allow
for commit messages / diffs to give away identities (i.e. "Joe
Bloggs really stuffed up, this fixes his stupid commit"), whilst a
major release requires only a quick string search through the
code, to eliminate any possible strings relating to names,
reducing the likelyhood of opening up your identity.
Anyhow, most of these arguments I thought were pretty obvious, but in
case they're not, there they are. I write these comments as someone who
has put aside MANY hours (a couple of days) pulling apart the
differences between your 2.0 to 2.1 to allow Johannes Sixt to commit
your changes incrementally to our repository. I feel for Johannes who
has done so many merges already, and would hope that in the future it is
less painful!
Yours Sincerely,
Pierre Dumuid
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