On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 08:04 +0200, Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote: > Especially as the pattern seems to be conductive to personal > gratification** more than community; and leads to patchcollections > which are the work of love of a single person quite easily. And that > seems to cause fragmentation on an end to end level. I.e. rather than > scratching your own itch - and solving it at a product level - you > create a small alternate reality in which you nullify the issue, in > which you isolate - and then welcome people on your island - but > you've not made the world a slightly easier place. Somehow it feels as > if there is some driver lacking, some positive need to have > communities collaborate.
I believe you have this backward; distributed version control systems are more conducive to community than their centralized counterparts. With a centralized vcs, a select group of privileged individuals are given access, they are the gate keepers. Everyone else gets a "working copy" and is expected to create a patch (or patches) and then work to convince a committer to apply them. A distributed version control system is a measure toward eliminating that have/have not distinction; it reduces the barrier to contribution. Instead of a working copy you get a full working repository. Contributors can have long running branches where they work on large features while easily keeping in sync with upstream changes. And when the contributor repos are public, others can follow their progress and provide feedback and collaborate. If useful changesets that are languishing in random repositories and are not making it upstream, that is a social problem, not a technical one. -- Eric Evans [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
