Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> On 11/2/07, Micah Elliott <mde@micahelliott.com> wrote:
>
>> Again, privacy. Linus' argument is that a big problem is that
>> branches are globally visible in the centralized model. Most
>> agree that "commit early, commit often" is desirable, but that's
>> restricted if your micro-commits are visible to the world, even
>> if it's only your own buggy branch. The picture to keep in mind
>> is that of a developer wanting to make a bunch of silly,
>> potentially embarrassing changes to his local branch while on a
>> spike, and later sending a super-commit (non-local) agglomerating
>> and cherry-picking only the "smart" net result of all the
>> micro-changes. This model better allows a developer to use the
>> VCS as a scratch pad to record whimsical direction.
>
> Are programmers really that prone to embarrassment? I mean, if you
> create a private branch in central repository, and tell your peers
> that you're just experimenting or saving scratch-work, what's the big
> deal? I've never thought of developers as so ... insecure.
You've been at Google too long.
It is not rare for developers (perhaps your so-called 80%[1], who are,
despite claims otherwise, still human) to have insecurity issues. That's
what drives them to work in isolation at all -- fear of peer review due to
lacking skills, or fear of losing a job because the boss pays for new
features and bug fixes and not risky "what if" innovation.
-- C-Mike
[1] http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=79
--
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato@collab.net>
CollabNet <> www.collab.net <> Distributed Development On Demand
Received on Fri Nov 2 15:47:38 2007