> -----Original Message-----
> From: C. Michael Pilato [mailto:cmpilato_at_collab.net]
> Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 7:47 PM
> To: Philip Martin
> Cc: dmitry boyarintsev; dev_at_subversion.apache.org
> Subject: Re: Pascal bindings
>
> On 09/02/2010 01:38 PM, Philip Martin wrote:
> > dmitry boyarintsev <skalogryz.lists_at_gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >> Hello Subversion-dev,
> >>
> >> I can see, that there's no much of interest in Pascal bindings.
> >> Well, that's quite understandable because of Pascal language not
> >> being popular.
> >>
> >> Anyway, I'll publish the headers on my site.
> >>
> >> Thank you for your great product!
> >
> > You are more likely to get some response if you send a patch against
> > trunk with a log message, see
> >
> > http://subversion.apache.org/docs/community-guide/general.html#patches
> >
> > Even if you do that I don't know that there is any great demand for
> > Pascal bindings. Are they generated or written by hand? Do they have
> > regression tests? Are they tied to any particular environment?
>
> All great questions, Philip. Another one that's on my mind is, "Is Dmitry
> volunteering to stick around and maintain these bindings?" We really try to
> avoid drop-and-ignore contributions of this sort, where none of the active
> committership appears to be interested (or perhaps even qualified) to
> maintain the new code.
While that's an ideal position to be in, isn't there room for a 'second class' addition to the main codebase where the code is present, hopefully working, yet comes with no warranty or is part of the automated test set.
The alternative is that valuable code would end up being posted to some website and wouldn’t have the visibility in the future if someone did come along, decided that they wanted the feature, and then spent the effort to fix it up (assuming it was broken).
As was mentioned, the python bindings were not maintained until recently when someone did send contributions in. If the python bindings were not present at all, this would not have happened.
So I'd say a pragmatic approach would be to take the contribution, and place it off to the side slightly compared to the 'tested, maintained' codebase and have the tests available to run manually. Maybe if someone comes along to maintain the code, then it can be moved to being a 'full' member of the codebase.
**** not that that is an issue in this case as Dmitry says he will actively maintain it, and other C bindings, although it appears he is already slightly alienated from contributing given his response.
Received on 2010-09-03 12:32:48 CEST