LCD 47 <[email protected]>:
> In my opinion the way forward is for enough people to start reading
> the code, patiently and diligently, in their own rhythm. Once there is
> a critical mass of developers who actually understand the code, and see
> it as just old, rather than terrible or evil, we might see progress.
This sounds like a good idea in theory, but I don't think Vim's current
development model lends itself to that. How do you determine if someome
"actually understands" the code? By submitting refactoring patches, or
enough patches in general? But several people already have submitted
many patches, and many of the needed refactorings, like getting rid of
global variables, actually require bigger changes, and Bram would
probably be (understandably) reluctant to include them right away. The
result of that would be that they just sit in the todo list like so many
other patches.
I think the best solution to this would be to get rid of the "one branch
with patches" model and instead have at least a stable and a development
branch, with more people than just Bram being able to commit to the
development branch. Bigger changes like refactorings or the new regex
engine even could get their own feature branch. That's what VCSs like
Mercurial are good at, but it's not being made use of at the moment.
With this model the stable branch would be used for releases and by
people who care most about stability, and people who are willing to try
out new features could use the development branch(es). Unless they
disable swap files that shouldn't even be a big risk in general. I'm
sure this approach would also motivate more people to contribute when
they don't feel like it's a gamble whether their changes will ever
actually make it in.
-Jan
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