Werner LEMBERG <[email protected]> writes: >>> Declare a feature freeze for a few weeks, with only trivial >>> additions and fixes for regressions and documentation issues. >> >> The time for a formal decision was too late, the more active >> developers informally agreed to try and nobody bothered actually >> doing so. > > Hmm. We discussed that, indeed, but noone stepped forward and > *declared* it.
There is nobody with that kind of authority. > I would like to make you our benevolent dictator who can decide > this... If you take a close look, the "benevolent dictator" model of the Linux kernel is actually non-existent. It's just that people like to call Linus' personal but published repository canonical. But it's not really privileged in comparison with other people's personal public repositories. His "dictatorship" does not give him any special powers or requires any enforcement. So what are his infamous tirades about that make headlines about twice a year? They are not about people bypassing his power (how could they?), but rather about breakdowns of his network of technical trust: he himself applied some patch in the expectation that whoever passed it to him would have reasonable expectations for it to meet the required quality criteria. We don't have something like a network of skilled active subsystem maintainers. In consequence, gatekeeping the central repository would be a lot of effort. We _did_ apply the "benevolent dictator" model to the stable branch in the past. Where is the difference as opposed to Linux kernel development? Basically testing coverage. Developers are interested in working with Linus' version of Linux. At the minimum, it is what patches tend to be based on. In addition, any patch of suitable interest is sure to get some people pounding on it even before it gets into Linus' view. Few if any people bother checking out release/stable/*, in contrast, and our reviewing tools and processes don't bother with it, either. Also we have far fewer people interested in whole "add-on" patch series, and our review tools make dealing with them awkward as well, leading to a high amount of resistance against "can you put this in a branch for now" requests. The skyline stuff was kept in a branch for quite a while, though, and was tested from there by several people. So in a nutshell, it's easy to declare me the benevolent dictator of the stable branch, but it has rather limited effects. In contrast, declaring me dictator over LilyPond master would, due to our master-centric development tools, put more resources exclusively under my control (meaning that you can't work well with them except under my supervision) than useful for continued parallel/independent development. So I don't really see a policy choice that can be implemented without some major drawbacks, due to limitations of our processes and tools. Basically, I think we are out of pretty solutions, and I am wary of the repercussions of some uglier solutions. That's frustrating, and frustration does not really increase the prettiness of what I am able to come up with. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
