On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 6:37 PM, Eric S. Raymond <esr_at_thyrsus.com> wrote:
> My problem is this. The script is no longer a casual hack with
> just enough substance to belong in a contrib directory - I'm probably
> going to write some actual unit tests for it tonight. But it's also not
> large enough, or separable enough from Subversion-as-it-is, that I
> feel it makes sense to ship it as a standalone project.
>
> Your advice is solicited.
My advice: what do you mean when you say that it does not make sense
to ship it as a standalone project?
In my opinion, the biggest success of Subversion is that it has made
creating and hosting new projects a much lower-overhead operation than
it was in the last millennium. (I mean this both through Subversion
itself, and through the host of other open source version control
projects in this VC Renaissance that Subversion ushered in.) Have a
little program that you want to share with the world? It takes just a
few clicks to set up a new project on Google Code, Github, or a host
of many other project hosting sites.
With your own project, you can decide to give commit access to other
interested parties without having to go through the Subversion
committers. With most of these project hosting sites, you can put up
your own releases and downloads on your own schedule without having to
deal with "oh, we haven't fixed all our release blockers so our
tarball can't go out yet".
Frankly, "every software project has to be some enormous,
high-overhead thing" is exactly the sort of attitude that comes from
clunky, difficult tools.
In my opinion, the contrib directory of Subversion is outdated and
should be phased out, and just converted to a list of links on a wiki
or something. Other Subversion developers agree with me on this, and
we may change our policy officially in the future.
That said, we haven't changed our policy yet, and if you really
believe that maintaining your project inside the bureaucracy of our
project actually makes sense for you, I'm pretty sure we'll say yes.
But is that actually more beneficial than taking 10 minutes to set up
a one-file project on a hosting site, and then never having to worry
about our project's particular quirks and details again?
--dave
--
glasser_at_davidglasser.net | langtonlabs.org | flickr.com/photos/glasser/
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Received on 2009-10-07 23:41:35 CEST