Hi Andy, > > Comments and criticisms welcome. > > > I suppose this is more of a troll than a criticism, sorry about that. > > > Classpath bugs don't > > have such administration issues due to > > its longer history as a FOSS project and existing community-oriented fun > > development paradigm. > Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Classpath lacks the basic > quality controls that OpenJDK has?
Classpath and most FOSS projects for that matter work differently, but still surprisingly well. From my experience with Classpath I can only say the following: - We have an extensive unit testsuite (Mauve) that has been developed alongside with Classpath. Many bugs got a corresponding Mauve test and a couple of regressions have been caught that way. While not beeing mandadory for any patch to go in, many developers have taken the responsibility to write tests and look out for regressions before committing. Of course, that has not always been the case, I am myself guilty of quickly checking in code that has not been checked that way. - The quick turnaround between the Classpath developers and users resulted in a much more efficient handling of bugs (IMO). This, together with the first point, has helped _a_lot_ to keep the overall quality suprisingly high, despite the apparent lack of formal processes (except the ones that Mark already mentioned). That whole discussion is probably interesting but mostly pointless. Both approaches (closed and open) apparently tend to produce relatively high quality code (or really crappy code, happens in both camps), where with the closed approach the developers (or vendors) have to take over 100% responsibility (because the end user has no way to interact with the development), which usually makes things very formal and slow, where the open approach relies very much on the end users reporting problems. In most active projects these are fixed really quickly, giving both the developers and the end users a warm fuzzy feeling ;-) Labelling FOSS as playground for bored developers is, uhm, strange. But yeah, now that Classpath has lost most of its end users, we might end up like that ;-) I don't care, I'll continue anyway. Cheers, Roman -- http://kennke.org/blog/
