Re: Intolerable CVS behaviour

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2001 at 12:35:18PM -0500 or thereabouts, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> But removing CVS access to the guy, or flaming him is not going to
> address a deeper problem that we have with the GNOME CVS.
>
> As I said before, the current GNOME CVS setup is not ideal, and as I
> have said in the past, this could have been avoided by having ACLs or
> using a SourceForge-like approach for managing the GNOME CVS.  My
> proposals have been shut down every time I have suggested something
> like this.
    
Or of having a document that tells people a little about CVS etiquette.
This is all stuff most people learned by talking, asking, watching,
or doing by accident. Ask most people how they know whether it's okay
to commit to certain modules or whether it should go by maintainers
first, and you get a ton of different answers: from "I read the
HACKING file" to "I ask the maintainer" to "if it's obvious, I check
it in anyway". Lots of it is just known through personal experience:
"I know xx hates anyone touching foo without express permission, but
I know yy would rather it goes in without his getting email every
single time".

I got CVS access and I looked everywhere for such a doc. I didn't
find it. Which suggests that if it exists, no-one else will find
it, because I do spend time looking before asking. Instead I just
asked and asked and asked on IRC, mailed things to people despite
having access, and am generally paranoid every time I check
something in. Because I just picked this up as I went along. It's
no good saying "Everyone knows, or should know, how to use it." I
don't. I just play very safe. And GNOME is now way too big for
me to remember the maintainer of every module and their personal
policy on checking in stuff to their bits. I was told that all
modules should have a HACKING file with this in. But HACKING files 
are -not- universal, or weren't last time I looked. Of the 25
complete modules I have checked out, two are docs-only, and two are
info (gnome-foundation, gnome-status -- which reminds me, does
anyone -use- gnome-status? Own up, did you even know it was
there? :)), but: 

[hobbit aloss /usr/local/cvs]$ find . -name HACKING | xargs ls -l   
-rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit        261 Oct 30  1999 ./crescendo/HACKING
-rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit       1449 Jan 20  1999 ./glib/HACKING
-rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit        490 Feb  6 12:44 ./gnome-applets/HACKING
-rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit        429 Jan 13 19:31 ./gnome-core/HACKING
-rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit        358 Oct 14  1999 ./gnome-games/HACKING
-rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit        184 Aug 10  1999 ./gnome-games/gtali/HACKING
-rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit        151 Oct 15  1999 ./gnome-games/iagno2/HACKING
-rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit       1062 Feb  6 14:21 ./gnome-libs/HACKING
-rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit       3727 Sep  7 02:07 ./gnome-print-admin/src/HACKING
-rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit       1724 Jan 19 23:10 ./gnome-vfs/HACKING

Eight out of twenty-odd. And before you say "some have README instead 
of  HACKING", you're right, yes. But in at least one case, the README 
is empty. :) 

Telsa