On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 03:03:23PM -0500, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Tom Lord <lord@regexps.com> writes:
> > I propose an intense and focused goal and design review, and goal and
> > design restatement, encompassing both of our projects, and looking
> > beyond them to the other tools in a software engineering tool-chain. I
> > think that now is a good time for us all to step back, take stock of
> > what we have and what we need, and to make a solid plan for execution
> > moving forward.
>
> Ahhh. Okay, I see what you're driving at.
>
> I agree with your observations about the scope of the general revision
> control problem. But Subversion can't afford a drastic redesign. We
> decided early on about the problem we were solving -- replacing CVS --
> and the software is targeted squarely at that problem. I'm betting we
> can add changeset functionality, but not via a complete redesign;
> instead, we will have to find ways to do it incrementally, without
> significantly delaying upcoming milestones. A complete rescoping at
> this point would be insanity, from a project management point of view.
Let's rephrase the terms of the dialogue.
What Subversion 1.0 will be is pretty much nailed down, at this point.
And I think that 1.0 will be a valuable system on its own terms. Just
replacing CVS, without making all of these interesting process
improvements, is valuable for all the organizations out there running
into the design limitations of CVS - working on GCC, I struggle with
these every day.
But the Subversion project isn't going to fold up and vanish just
because 1.0 is out the door. There's tons of ideas that have shown up
and been relegated to "post 1.0" - well, now might be a good time to
start talking about the road map for 2.0, and specifically whether we
can fit some of Tom's ideas into Subversion in that time frame.
Incremental change is a good thing. Suppose we put Subversion 1.0 out
there with a clear migration path from CVS, and get uptake from major
free software development projects. There won't be any radical
process improvements like the ones Tom is suggesting, just from that.
But, suppose that some of Tom's ideas show up in Subversion 2.0 - then
the people out there who are using 1.0 will have a much easier
migration path to those new ideas, than if they were to have to jump
from CVS *and* from their old process at the same time.
I have a couple of specific comments on Tom's white paper which I will
put in a separate message.
zw
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Received on Thu Oct 10 23:30:22 2002