On Nov 26, 2007, at 10:32 AM, Jonathon -- Improov wrote:
The way we are doing it now, it's anal-retentive. It's like saying "wait, boss, one more bugfix, just one more", and saying that for a whole long year! I usually publish "release candidates" for my boss, let him test it, let him scream the bug reports to me, then release the next "release candidate" when he's gotten upset enough.
Maybe the way you are doing it now... "we" is going a little far...
Ok, next question. So why not just let the whole world test the moving OFBiz 4.0 branch? Why bother with publishing tarballs and release candidates? Here's a simple analogy. Try telling our bosses "boss, can you learn some SVN and test my bugfixes, so I don't have to prepare tarballs for you?". Perhaps a good 99% of the population don't want to hear the 3 letters "SVN" when they attempt to download and test OFBiz.
There is certainly a target audience in that. But consider the nature of OFBiz: it is most commonly used by developers or analysts that full- on customize or at least significantly configure OFBiz to make it possible to use in their businesses. It just isn't designed and hasn't been implemented for OOTB (out-of-the-box) use.
Also consider that what we really need for a strong community is for users to offer feedback and contributions to move the project forward. In fact that is the ONLY way that OFBiz moves forward as there is no company that owns or sponsors OFBiz.
So, we WANT people to use OFBiz from SVN. I don't know about the others who are involved more actively in managing and moderating OFBiz (ie the PMC members and committers), but for me the thought of having thousands of users who don't want to customize and don't contribute is REALLY scary. Imagine all of the complaints and problems that the current community isn't big or experienced enough to support for free in a good old community fashion...
Don't get me wrong, I ONLY wrote what and I wrote and don't read other stuff into it. This (a binary release) IS something that is necessary to help grow the project, but with limited resources and most of those going into trying to stabilize development and contributions because most contributors write WAY more than they read and research... we are where we are, and it is what it is. To put it in more concrete terms: if I have to spend 20 hours a week researching stuff so people don't commit things that are inconsistent or difficult to manage or contradict or break things that exist, where do I get time to actually do administrative tasks like creating a binary release?
Also, given that the 3rd-party binaries (more than 50% of OFBiz download size is *not* OFBiz codes!) is in the SVN, it is in the OFBiz PMC's interest to lessen the load on the SVN server wherever possible.
Nice try. Machines are machines and are cheap and easy to manage. People are people and are expensive and difficult to manage. It's that simple. If it makes things more difficult for developers it will hamper or kill the project.
Not gonna happen, especially if we want it to be possible to have enough resources to put together a binary release anytime soon...
Just my 2 cents. I'm feeling very embarrassed for beating this topic so much to death by now.
Your comments are always welcome. Feel free to re-hash too, things certainly change over time. Just don't be too surprised if I pull out every gun I can think of to argue against something that I think will be bad for the project, especially if I am re-writing the thoughts.
-David
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