Frank W. Zammetti wrote:
Are you trying to say that driving ISN'T dangerous and that there AREN'T tons of "crazies" on the road?
Frank, there is a metaphor gap here anyway. We were discussing how dangerous it is to let anybody who wants to commit code do so.
Now, you can restore the code repository to the exact same state it was in the past before the person's commits.
In the case of driving, if you are seriously injured or killed in an accident, your body cannot be instantly restored to the state it was in before the accident.
Dave Newton came up with a mountaineering analogy that suffers from basically the exact same "metaphor gap", where he was talking about the context of a rock-climbing expedition for "earning trust", making an implicit analogy with earning trust to be able to commit code. Can you seriously compare the risk of someone falling off a cliff with that of a temporary cock-up in the code repository?
In software development, the fact that you can just back out the changes or restore the code from a previous snapshot in the worst cases, basically means that the risk-reward equation is nothing like it is in these other activities anyway.
If that wasn't enough hyperbole, a nuclear meltdown simile was offered at some point too. There is such hyperbole in these comparisons that and, on the face of it, they basically are ridiculous. I don't think this is a consequence of bad faith. But I do attribute it to sloppy reasoning.
Well, the other thing is cognitive dissonance. If you suddenly accept (even just temporarily for the sake of argument, let's say) that what I am saying is true, it means that all this Apache Way stuff and everything they have written about meritocracy is basically fatuous nonsense. And the implications of that, the cognitive dissonance, could be disturbing.... :-)
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it is an interesting hypothesis to explore, is it not? The idea that the barriers to becomming a committer serve absolutely no real purpose?
As for people saying this shouldn't be discussed, it is not the ostensible topic of this list, but the discussion developed here. The people now complaining about this thread, it's not clear what their grievance is... If somebody is not interested, they don't have to read it...
Jonathan Revusky -- lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
