Re: CVS debacle

["Jesse D. Sightler" <jsight pair com>]

>One of the cornerstones of a systematic quality control system is that
>the developer must rebuild and run regression tests before committing to
>prevent bugs from getting into the trunk of the source repository.  With
>gnome, we get a totally backwards QA system: commit all the changes at
>once without testing, ignore scores of failing assertions, unleash it on
>the public and hope that they will find the bugs.


I think that you are wrong here.  The strength of free software is it's
ability to have software developed and debugged rapidly by just this sort of
a "backwards" process.  In other words, it is perfectly acceptible for code
to have unusable features and problems for days if the developers fix them
later.  This just makes sense to me, as gnome-libs developers could not
possibly be expected to fix every other app before committing a change to
the server.  :)

Note, however, that I do not believe that this applies to compile time
issues.  Any developer throwing things into the code that are not compilable
should be burnt at the stake.  Well ok, maybe that's SLIGHTLY too harsh, but
really, a Mozilla style Tinderbox "blame" system would be both very nice.

>Personally, I am proud when I send source to testing and they don't send
>it back.  I don't expect them to compensate for a slack development
>process.

I'm glad.  Just realize this, people downloading from CVS are not end-users,
they are end-developers.  :)


-------------------
Jesse D. Sightler
http://www3.pair.com/jsight/