On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Julia Lawall <[email protected]> wrote:
> Encouraging outside contributions is really just beyond the current goals > and manpower of the project. Anyone is welcome to submit a patch against > the released version. But until managing that becomes a problem, I would > prefer to keep things as they are. I might add that the linux kernel was developed like this for years at end. People simply sent around patches and patches got applied. The OpenBSD team has continued this trend (last time I looked, which is about a couple of years ago). If you do point releases at a certain rate (depending on the number of contributions), I think this might actually work out fairly well. The switch to first BitKeeper and then later on Git seem to be mandated by the fact that at a certain point, the patches grew to a large number. At that point, RC systems became the viable option to harness the complexity. My personal trick would probably be to do what happened in the Erlang community before they released all code on GitHub.com -- A kind soul provided a repository tracking all releases of the Erlang system. People provided patches on top of this repository and there some healthy development. The fact that you can just export a series of patches such that it can be applied against the latest released version makes cross-pollination easy. And it worked surprisingly well. At some later point, the Erlang people at Ericsson took the full bite of the apple and put a full repository at github. For their Erlang system, it was a tremendous success as a fair amount of patches now come from the outside. However, I do not know the overhead in maintaining and applying "foreign" patches for them. For cocci, there is quite a number of papers you probably should have read before diving into certain parts of the code base. I, for instance, only know the shallow overview of CTL-vw (and perhaps CTL-vw is not even used anymore!) and I have only dabbled a bit in the indentation-preserving parser part of the code. It is far from enough to be able to hack it with a safe knowledge of not messing up something. I believe that most non-cosmetic patches would have to put some toll on Julia, one of her students, another cocci-collaborator etc., because of the complexity of the code. -- J. _______________________________________________ Cocci mailing list [email protected] http://lists.diku.dk/mailman/listinfo/cocci (Web access from inside DIKUs LAN only)
