Hello Discuss mailing list, I'm moving this over from the Dev mailing list. The question is, how do I proceed with visibly broken changes to the mechanism? (I'll include the relevant discussion below, but will incorporate it into this top-level post.)
I was initially going to pose this as a question, but now I'm just
going to Let It Be Known: I'm going ahead with visibly-breaking
changes.
I actually agree with Aaron that breaking things at least *shows
progress*. It is totally possible to break the mechanism's visible
aspects without breaking other parts of the site, like tickets or
discussions or the wiki. Plus, the mechanism is already broken, and
that fact is already made visible to a greater or lesser extent.
The only reservation I have is, how long will it stay broken?
I guess I'm the one to answer that question, but unfortunately I don't
know right now.
Let me fill you in on what's happening. I have been working to
separate the mechanism logic into its own, self-contained code unit
("module"). Doing so broke a couple things, which will be fixed later.
First, though, I'm going to separate out other modules:
- the wiki
- notifications
- discussions
- tickets
- others?
That means I won't be fixing the mechanism right away, and in fact, I
couldn't do so anyway. The other components need to be separated out
first.
The alternative to breaking things would be to keep this new code on a
separate branch, but that creates a lot of trouble. Work done in
parallel is harder to synchronize. Things stagnate. Velocity wanes.
This is just going to be a rocky time right now, but the payoff will
be huge!
On Wed, Nov 04, 2015 at 09:19:57PM -0500, Stephen Michel wrote:
>
>
> On November 4, 2015 9:14:12 PM EST, Aaron Wolf
> <aa...@snowdrift.coop> wrote:
> >
> >
> >On 11/04/2015 04:56 PM, Bryan Richter wrote:
> >>
> >> This is more a question for the discuss@ list, I guess, but what
> >> do you think? Should I go ahead and "break" the website? The only
> >> loss will be UI/UX bugs related to the mechanism, and the
> >> cessation of payouts.
> >>
> >
> >Exciting to hear about the progress. I think it's *much* more
> >important that the site show changes, breakage, new things, etc.
> >than that it be stable. Here's what we *need* stable on the site:
> >access to the wiki pages, editing, commenting, ticket searching and
> >sorting, discussion, the establishment process…
> >
> >The fact that the mechanism is broken means it isn't giving people
> >a great impression anyway. I am *strongly* in favor of (actually
> >*want* to see) the updates get to master sooner rather than later,
> >but only as long as no link just fails, no page is truly broken
> >broken… i.e. show a "broken for now, update in progress [DATE]"
> >message which will give people the sense that things are happening!
> >So we want to be sure every FIXME issue is presented on the
> >front-end, and then we should merge and deploy even…
>
> Agreed in some ways.
>
> I when it comes to bugs, I VERY MUCH prefer the visible variety.
>
> That said, as a beta tester (or person who is interested in being
> involved but not in the thick of it), it's frustrating if much time
> passes without change, and can lead to a lack of engagement and
> people walking away.
>
> Overall I'm leaning towards the 'break it now' option, but I want to
> make sure that before you break things, there's a plan in motion to
> fix them.
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