On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 08:03:28AM -0400, Mark Phippard wrote: > Personally, I do not care at all about experimental features and shelving. I > would favor ripping it all out and let it come back in a future release if > someone wants to finish and turn it into a feature that we are willing to > support forever. Right now, I cannot foresee a scenario where this feature > ever becomes finished. I do not see why we are even doing the work to include > it. I realize ripping it out would be work that someone has to do too > though.
I don't think asking "why are we even doing this" is helpful. Let's be clear on why this happened: It's because of lack of funding for Julian and most other developers, who were previously very active and now have only very little amounts of time they can afford to spend on SVN. It's not because this feature is a bad idea, or the work that's already been put in wasn't any useful. It is because developing new features in our current situation is very difficult. If we still had 1.7 era activity levels with 10+ active developers, my guess is that the shelving feature would have long been done and shipped. To put things in perspective, look at the complexity of the problems Julian has been dealing with: https://blog.foad.me.uk/2020/03/02/svn-shelving-development-review/ Now Julian is already doing further voluntary work to address blockers for the upcoming release. Discouraging this kind of activity now makes things even worse. It implies we still haven't adjusted our expectations to the reality that we are doing pure volunteer work. In a project which is mostly consumed by companies to build products to make money, this new reality is very hard to swallow. Even slightly pushing volunteer developers the wrong way could mean losing them entirely. > I do not fully understand the editor path bug. But if you are saying it > cannot be fixed in an existing release because of API changes, then that > sounds like the priority. Unless Bert has time, I am not sure where we get > Windows help now though. As far as I understand, the problem is that people need to quote their editor commands in certain ways to prevent parts of filenames being interpreted as commands by the shell. This has security implications. See https://svn.apache.org/r1874057 The editor command is part of the configuration file. We can't change the quoting rules in a patch release without breaking existing installations because, according to our compatibility guidelines, users should be able to switch freely between patch releases without having to change anything other than the set of binaries they are using. The open problem is that the new quoting code won't work on Windows, even though it is using an APR-provided function to sanitize the filename. >From my point of view this is something that should be fixed in APR if possible. > Anyway, I have a small window here where I have been able to maybe get our > SVN support updated from 1.8 to a newer version. 1.14 is the only one I am > interested in, so I am hoping the release process starts soon. That is good news! Does this mean you might be able to get some people at CollabNet activated to look at some of the issues we still need to solve before 1.14 can be released?