> This is coming from a person who wants to simultaneously give 90+ people
> karma to the core components upon which everybody will be asked to depend.
The problem was never that too many people have access to a
component, but that too few people.
How many commiters are in tomcat ? How many are actively doing changes ?
Do we suffer from too many commiters ? I wish...
What I am saying is that if a project depends on a component it should
have a vote in the component evolution. If 90+ people have karma to a core
component, maybe at least 5 will actually review the changes, and if 2
projects depend on it maybe the changes will be more predictible and will
require buy-in from all interested parties.
IMHO we suffer from too small comunities and too little review ( and too
much talk ) - that's what leads to incompatibilites ( and there is nothing
wrong with changes - but with un-predictible changes at un-predictible
moments ).
> I can predict what will happen - each will quickly scarf away a binary
> snapshot.
That may happen as well - at least on the short term. But on the long term
the components will stabilize and those working on the components will get
the feedback that is needed.
> At the core is a common fundamental issue: setting things up so that the
> individual code bases can be independent of one another to the point where
> they can tolerate changes gracefully. And the path to get there is to
> build up both trust and value.
Maybe. But right now we have to deal with the fact that everything changes
too fast for most people to be able to track everything ( I can't
). With 90+ commiters on shared components there may be hope that at least
few are able to find the time to track it, and changes are at least
coordinated with the people that are affected by the change.
Costin
