* Karl Fogel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [000215 17:40] wrote:
> Alfred Perlstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > The reason you're talking on the wrong list is that it seems that
> > most of maintainers of CVS currently have a 'philosophy'.
> > It seems that in the last couple of years philosophy has been the
> > thing to strive for rather than program correctness.
> >
> > Instead of all these warning lights on all the junk that doesn't
> > work in CVS it should either be ripped out or the maintainers should
> > allow fixes to be incorperated!
> >
> > Imagine someone's dismay at fixing things like symlink support or
> > locks only to be told that "we want it broken".
>
> I should probably stay off this list, as info-cvs has degraded in
> recent months; however I will give in to temptation and respond to
> what I think is a mischaracterization (albeit unintentional) of the
> CVS developers.
>
> Believe me, most CVS developers would love good symlink support, or
> permission support, or even unobtrusive locking support. No one ever
> said "we want it broken", except perhaps in jest.
>
> The reason a good patch gets ignored is that the developers do not
> have time to review the patch with sufficient care. And failure to
> review patches has led to problems in the past (mea culpa), so this is
> not an imaginary problem -- it is quite possible to do harm by letting
> a bad patch in, and distinguishing good from bad is a highly
> non-trivial exercise.
>
> > Somehow I feel this to be somewhat of a sadistic thing to do to
> > users as well as misusing the whole concept of open source.
>
> Do I have to respond to this? :)
>
> > I can understand a stance where CVS developers refuse to work on
> > problem reports with locking or symlinks because they don't want
> > to deal with it, but refusing patches that fix real problems is
> > pretty bogus.
>
> The stance you say you'd understand is the stance most of us actually
> take.
>
> I think you are confusing people who maintain CVS with people who post
> a lot to info-cvs. These two groups are distinct, if not entirely
> disjoint. In fact, there's usually an inverse correlation -- after
> all, anyone who spends all their time posting to this list can't
> possibly be doing any real work on CVS, right? :-)
>
> > Seriously folks, the issues with locking and symlinks should up to
> > the community to decide... as long as they are the ones doing the
> > work and it doesn't impact on non-locking/non-link CVS functionality.
>
> You are free to do the work (and it's a lot of work) and release your
> own CVS. If your CVS is sufficiently advanced over the current CVS --
> and by "current" I mean "the CVS to which you have been referring in
> your mail" -- then I'll be happy to use yours instead.
>
> The code is free and anyone is welcome to maintain a version of it.
> There happens to be a group of people, with unfortunately not much
> spare time, who collaborate on maintaining the version that can be
> downloaded from cyclic.com. There are many changes they'd like to
> make to this version, but they don't have time. On the other hand,
> they don't want to promiscuously include contributions from all over
> the place, because they're afraid the quality of their CVS will suffer
> (and they're probably right, considering that most patches to CVS have
> bugs and go through several rounds before they're fixed). Hence their
> CVS progresses at a slower rate than some users want.
>
> This is not due to territoriality, nor malice, nor an overdeveloped
> sense of philosophy or principle. It's simply the predictable outcome
> of a situation where people are trying *first* to do no harm, and
> *secondly* to improve the program.
>
> > But that doesn't seem possible with the current maintainers being so
> > blinded by thier own philosophy. And unfortunatly no one with
> > enough resources to actively maintain something has forked a version
> > of CVS that is committed to doing the right thing.
>
> Right. You're only mistaken about the motivations of the current
> maintainers -- they are limited by time, not vision.
If this is how the rest of the CVS developers feel then...
Action should be taken to ensure that Greg Woods doesn't continue
to mis-represent the project as a whole and developers should keep
a bit closer tabs on the lists to ensure that this sort of thing
doesn't happen in the future.
If it's the opinion that the list has 'degraded' over the last
couple of months, then steps should be taken that _official and
active_ CVS developers attempt to occasionally stick thier heads
into the fray to correct people that are fostering false representation
of the CVS project's goals.
Basically, if this is the official CVS list, then a real developer
presense is nessesary, maybe not to answer questions, but to make
sure that people have the right kind of idea about your project.
If certain parts of the system are officially broken, and have been
broken for AT LEAST A YEAR then action needs to be taken to either
officially mark them as 'broken' or remove them entirely, so that
they don't sit there as potential traps for the unwary!
Either
a) fix it.
b) mark it as broken.
b) chop it out.
c) allow patches to go in to address it.
Stop letting this junk stagnate.
I appreciate your effort with trying to clear things up for me, it seems
there's a lot of work involved to get things back on track.
best of luck,
-Alfred
