Re: Tinderbox.

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Michael Meeks <michael ximian com> writes:

> On 11 Mar 2001, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > This should be a step in the "work plan" in our proposal, between "set
> > up branches" and "set up tinderbox."
> 
>         Useful though a tinderbox is, I'm taking a preemptive strike on   
> the issue - I do not believe that random people should be allowed to
> commit unapproved crud to CVS that happens to make it build on the
> tinderbox [1].
> 
>         I tend to think that if you are not competant to fix the trivial
> sort of build problems that you get from time to time with CVS HEAD
> (anything) that you should not be building from CVS.
> 
>         Of course, one way to solve this would be to have the tinderbox
> tag the CVS at its last successful build of a package: tinderbox_head or
> somesuch.

Hi Michael,

I think we have a bit of a difference of opinion on this. Keeping cvs
HEAD qalways compiling is essential for work to progress
effectively. Many people on this thread have mentioned the difficulty
of building they feel is imposed by having many modules to
build. Imagine if in addition to that, each day they have a different
set of build fixes they must do manually to the code!

When someone committed a needed build fix to a module I maintain or
work on without going through some official process, I do not get
angry, I would _thank_ them for doing what should be my responsibility
as maintainer. And if their fix was not quite right in all dimensions,
I would take it as my responsibility to fix it up as the penalty for
checking in something that breaks the build or letting through another
patch that does.

I will go so far as to say something perhaps mildly heretical, that
keeping things compiling should supersede maintainerly
authority. Maintainership is not supposed to be a position of
arbitrary power, it is supposed to be a position of repsonsibility
held in trust for the benefit of the free software community as a
while. And I think trying to stop people from committing needed build
fixes has no place in the worldview that sees a maintainer as a
caretaker (that's really what the word `maintainer' means, more or
less) and not a ruler.

I am really disturbed by the trend among some to get really anal about
maintainership these days, to the point where the maintainer's
authority starts to be seen as an end in itself, not merely a means to
the end of a world where everyone can use free software.

All that being said, when I personally commit build fixes for Bonobo,
I always sned you the patch afterwards as you have requested, and I
would hope others do so as well. I think that is a reasonably
courteous thing to do. I even offer to change the way I fix things if
you don't like the particular alternative chosen. And for things I
can't trivially fix like a new header someone forgot to check in, I
usually email whoever did it and give them some time to fix things
rather than brute-forcing things.

I hope you find that to be OK behavior.


Regards,

Maciej