On Tuesday, April 04, 2006 10:56 PM Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: > ... > Somehow I understood that the "wider" public will see only > the two-month interval, while the developers could see > immediate patches (I'm mostly initerested in the other > changes that were suggested and applied, not in the "end" > thingy). Since the developers have write access, I believe > it would relieve the burden on you if they could check-in > patches, after public review and we have procedure for that > (we already have procedure for producing and testing patches). >
Ah, now wouldn't it be wonderful if we actually had a group of Axiom developers who were willing and able to do what you suggest! As far as I know, in two years I am the only one besides Tim who has ever committed anything to the main branch and I haven't done that in over a year... :( I think we need a theory to explain why what you suggest has not happened yet. Here are some possible explanations (in no particular order): 1) the literate programming (pamphlet) format is more effort that most people are willing to commit to the project. 2) Tim's manual, re-check-everything-twice is intimidating to other developers -- nobody wants to commit their "mistakes" to the archive. 3) Setting up and using arch with sftp write access is too complex. It's easier to just let Tim do it. 4) There are not enough people who have sufficiently deep experience with the Axiom source code and those that do are already too busy doing other things. 5) The centralized source code repository model sucks. The current multiple-branch approach in the Axiom archive is not being used effectively. People are still unwilling to take responsibility for maintain a particular centrally accessible branch. I think we need cures for some (or all) of these potential problems before Axiom development can approach anything like the development model for gcc. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer