At 4:59 PM -0700 10/21/03, Marc Singer wrote:
>On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 06:48:39PM -0500, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> >
> > Here are some points based on real empirical evidence, rather than
> > fuzzy feelings:
> > ...
>> * Every once in a while, somebody comes to the list, and says,
>> "global revisions are a bad idea", or "I can't live without
>> per-file or per-project revision numbers". We tell them to try it
>> out, and they come back and say, "hey yeah, it does work."
>
>Or, they don't come back at all. Do you really know that the
>conversion rate is?
Well, of course not. Still, in the spirit of empirical evidence, let
me say that I've worked at a number of large, "enterprise" shops,
including HP, Informix, SGI, and Rational; I've been involved in
version control and process management for 20 years, and shipped a
lot of code. And while that certainly doesn't make me an
Unanswerable God Of Everything, it lends a certain interest to the
observation that I have never, ever had to build a tool that would
harvest the "change rate" info implicit in all the "one change, one
version" systems we used during all that time. There may be a
tangible market for this sort of info, but I've never stumbled into
it. Every software manager *I've* ever worked with has been far more
concerned with controlling the bug rate and the feature-release rate
than the change rate either on any single file or on any composite
file set. I've built a whale of a lot of systems to harvest and
analyze *that* data! But none at all to leverage "change number."
>Is is really a bad idea to be able to put a keyword entry in a file
>that is a file-relative change count?
Naaaah. But (a) it's a bit more complicated than that, and (b) we're
trying to stabilize, not perturb, the release at the moment. And
since (c) we're collectively (if not unanimously) pretty sure the
value is rather low.....
--
-==-
Jack Repenning
CollabNet, Inc.
8000 Marina Boulevard, Suite 600
Brisbane, California 94005
o: 650.228.2562
c: 408.835.8090
f: 650.228.2501
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Received on Wed Oct 22 02:14:06 2003