On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 01:21:01PM -0500, kfogel@collab.net wrote:
> The answer is that it's not just a matter of hiring someone for a
> certain amount of time. One can't just say "It takes 3 months to get
> up to speed enough to write the patch, another 2 months to design it,
> and another 2 months to code it up." It's also a matter of remaining
> in the development community, being around to see how users react to
> the feature, to deal with bugs when they come up, etc. It doesn't
> match well with a piece-work/subcontractor methodology (I have some
> experiences that corroborate this).
Sure, but that's the way the people who hold the money want to think. I'm
trying to translate between the two world views, here. I have some notion of
what is required to get a new feature into an open source project, but I'm
trying to estimate the size of the technical hurddles. I understand that the
social hurdles are greater still.
> Of course, you can pay anyone to make any private patch to Subversion you
> want. I'm assuming you prefer the functionality to be present in the public
> Subversion, so you don't have to maintain a patch, though.
And because it would guarantee a higher level of quality, and because I'm
also interested in giving back to the community if possible--I think there
may even be a business case for that.
> Note that we have made a lot of progress on designing a locking system
> already. The effort has stalled for a bit because some other
> responsibilities came up for some of the parties involved, but they will get
> back to it when those responsibilities are over. I'm pretty confident that
> we'll have locking within a year, but not in less than (say) three months.
Is there any issue of ownership? I mean would work on this feature by
someone other than the origal author be ill-received?
> For now, I'd say your best options are a) find some sort of workaround, or b)
> delay the rollout of Subversion until locking is closer.
Sadly, we're not debating when to roll-out but rather what to roll-out.
Subversion is still a front-runner because our developers are spread accross
a few countries. I'd still like to create an estimate of the effort involved
in adding the feature sooner. I'll also be gathering information on
workarounds and as Mark suggested ways to, um, educate my users.
Thanks for taking the time to respond,
Seth
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Received on Wed Aug 25 23:17:19 2004