On 16/11/06, Steve Vinoski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
What is somewhat ironic to me is that you guys see no harm into reaching into upstream svn repositories for artifacts, yet you insist on doing a whole M1 release for this existing customer. Since grabbing directly from svn is OK in your book, why not just save everyone here all the trouble surrounding M1 so far and reach directly into the qpid svn repository for that customer? I'm not trying to be combative or humorous, I'm just trying to figure out why it's OK to do so in one case but not in the other.
Let me split this answer into two sections. First, in general reaching into other repositories is obviously not in general going to be a recipe for success and reliability. However in some cases, particularly libraries like MINA where we have a good deal of expertise and follow every development very closely, I believe it makes sense. The other case that springs to mind would be where the dependency is known to be very stable and we need a simple bug fix. To address the second point, we (i.e. the company I work for) could certainly just grab the code at some point and store it internally and manage patches ourselves. We certainly have knowledge of the state of the codebase. However we are not in the position of having all the infrastructure to manage patches and tracking releases like that - it's just not something that for this project we would like to do. We have several internal customers that we want to get on a "well known" release to get our support house in order and we think the best way of doing that is getting a milestone release done. This discussion has highlighted that we do need to rethink a patch management process if it is not something typically supported by Apache, but I have not thought about that in detail. RG
