[oi-dev] Stable and some processes going forward

[Josef 'Jeff' Sipek]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 03:31:26PM +0100, Bayard G. Bell wrote:
> I'd like to rewind to the question about the place of experimental
> because I don't think we've got our heads around it. I'm not sure I've
> got my head around it, but each time I've tried to lay this out, we seem
> to end up talking about what results we want without fully disposing of
> the practical issues that have in fact cropped up.
> 
> Here's how I'd summarise it: richlowe asked us not to deploy Mercurial
> 1.8.4, and we said we'd do that. Nevertheless, 1.8.4 is in experimental,

FWIW, we inherited that from userland-gate.

> and the arrangement at the moment is that developers working with
> oi-build must use experimental. It matters not that it hasn't been
> introduced to dev per se: the disruption happens as soon as it is
> introduced to experimental, where experimental the environment used to
> prepare further changes for submission to experimental. experimental is
> meant to allow people who want to contribute to have changes accepted
> immediately, but using it for development means that initial acceptance
> means developer acceptance.
> 
> Changes that are disruptive to development aren't segregated because
> nothing's in place to decide what bits of experimental should be tagged
> together and form a coherent build. (With 151 we had that handed to us
> to a significant extent.) The way our trade-off looks is that we reduced
> the burden for acceptance by effectively shifting the burden of
> integrating it to the development community generally. Particularly if
> there are a significant number of disruptive changes pending, this can
> make it very hard for development to progress, but even if there's just
> one doozy, how would we deal? As it is, I think we're not managing to do
> so by working on an ad hoc basis.

I agree that some of the integration burden has been pushed onto the
developers.  Personally, I think that's a good thing.  How long did it take
to integrate all the 151 pieces to make 151a?  Too long.  Distributing some
of the effort should speed things up a bit.  Things will get better once 151
is out of the way - and /dev will be based on oi-build.  Then, if a
developer wants to contribute to, they can build against /dev, which should
make it fairly easy to port to /experimental's oi-build.

So, we need to get 151 out of the way - either by getting on with it and
releasing it, or by dumping it and basing the first /stable on oi-build.
I'm on the fence about which one to do, but at the moment I'm leaning toward
releasing 151 - in large part because Meths volunteered.

Jeff.

-- 
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
		- Dennis M. Ritchie.