Re: Design by Community



On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 11:09 +0000, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 12:57 +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> >> This course of action will create a time when GNOME goes the way of
> >> propriortary UNIX: Tru64, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX... imagine a
> >> world with Novell Desktop, Topaz, Java Desktop, the Hatrack Environment:
> >> all competing products... where is GNOME?
> >>
> > not if the changes are not kept proprietary and sent upstream sooner or
> > later.
> 
> 
> perhaps but the real question is why isn't this a branch in CVS? Why is 
> there a need for clandestine development?

  Maybe because CVS branches are inherently complicated.  And maybe
because you have to ask permission of the maintainer before creating a
branch on a module.  And maybe because if everyone starts making lots of
branches, your namespace of CVS branches/tags starts to get polluted
very quickly.

  I know some very wise people have decided, apparently without much
discussion with the community, that GNOME would switch to Subversion.
But I keep thinking that, although Subversion is much better than CVS,
maybe we would benefit more from a distributed version control system,
like mercurial, bzr, git, monotone, etc.

  I keep wondering whether the decision to switch to Subversion is due
to the large number of similar looking alternatives and lack of courage
from the GNOME leadership to pick one, while in the centralized version
control systems Subversion is becoming _the_ alternative to CVS, so it's
easier to pick Subversion rather than _choose_ one of the distributed
control systems.

  There's a very interesting thread in the cairo list regarding a
potential switch from CVS to git.  I commend Carl Worth for the courage
of proposing this; maybe the GNOME project should take cue from him.

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2006-February/006255.html

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
<gjc inescporto pt> <gustavo users sourceforge net>
The universe is always one step beyond logic.

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