Re: ARC & GNOME [Was: How we make decisions...]

[Ed Hunter <ed hunter Sun COM>]

Thank you all for the comments and clarifications.  I'm beginning to get a
clearer picture of what things would be helpful for the Gnome community and
where Sun could help out here.  Based on what I've read so far there appear to
be three major areas that we could focus on.  The first is QA, the second is
tools and the third is process.  Let me deal with each of these in turn.

QA - There needs to be some focus on detecting problems in early testing.  The
sooner you can detect incompatibilities due to interface changes the sooner
you can get them fixed.  Right now this might be a question of resources which
potentially Sun or other companies could contribute to.

Tools - There needs to be a mechanism for proactively figuring out what might
have broken as code is developed and before it goes into broader testing.  If
you can prevent the breakage from going into the code base that's the very
effective.

Process - There should be some process to get some insight into how potential
changes might affect the various interfaces (API's, file locations, config
file content etc.)  If you can determine the affect of various decisions
before you've committed them to code that's the most effective way (and
hardest) of preventing problems.

These three areas range from more tactical to more strategic in my mind.  Each
could be addressed separately or in parallel.  The key thing is more clearly
understand what areas we're trying to improve (or where we want to prevent
problems).  For instance, it's clear that some people see compatibility
focused on the library API while others see it encompassing things like file
system location and other attributes that customers might latch on to.

I'd like to spend some time trying to classify/understand the types of issues
you all run into.  Is there someone who could give me some history on problems
that the community has run into in terms of compatibility between components
in the last six months to a year say?
-edh