On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 12:33 AM, Ian Boston <i...@tfd.co.uk> wrote:

>
> Scroll down :)
> <snip>
>


> I hear what you are saying about getting trunk into production to allow the
> Opensocial and Gadget Developer community to review spec changes, but surely
> anyone pushing to production should be a branch and merging commits to
> stable points rather than expecting head of trunk to be stable at all times?
> If it cant be done with svn because of the rate of change, then perhaps
> cloning the Git mirror of shindig will make a branch viable as it *is*
> (IMHO) better at merging high volume patch streams.
>


I kind of tried to cover that in my lengthy rambling too, a lot of the
current contributions are either people developing:

   -  spec suggestions
   - prototypes for voted in spec changes
   - developing new spec items, which they deploy to a sandbox to get
   feedback (please do note the *sandbox* part, it's not always directly live:)
   - Someone deploying a recent version of shindig to their platform (you
   can easily tell when hi5, linked-in, ning, etc do their upgrade cycle since
   that's when we get a storm of patches from them)

So there is no real 'pie in the sky' type development going on, ie long term
"hey wouldn't it be nice if we did FOO in a couple of months, lets try it",
everything that is being developed is to form the new spec, implement the
new spec, or to fix some issues that came up during deployment on someone's
platform.

Now while we're implementing a new spec (as we're working on 0.9 support
right now), there's definitely an opportunity for people to jump in and pick
one of the items, especially since the spec is the documentation of what
needs to be implemented; However since we like to see how these things work
in practise so we don't develop a theoretical spec that doesn't work, we
probably do want to keep these iteration cycles relatively short (1 or 2
months max).

And while I'm writing this, it also occurs to me that maybe the barrier of
entry for shindig is higher since we implement a spec (so half of the good
stuff, the design, happens in the spec process), and don't really allow wild
changes in shindig that would break away from the spec, or new features that
are not part of the spec (for obvious reasons, if we had 10^99 versions of
OpenSocial, it wouldn't be a usable platform anymore).

That's probably not so exciting and inviting as some other open source
projects where people have much more of a free hand. (though do note: by
participating in the spec process, you do actually have the opportunity to
help determine the design, it just happens on a different list since we like
the spec to be implementation neutral and not tied to just one vendor or
implementation)

   -- Chris

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