On piątek 14 marzec 2003 08:44 am, John Levon wrote: > On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 08:20:44AM -0500, Kuba Ober wrote: > > No matter how small or "insignificant" a change is, there should be a way > > to review it without having to post a patch to the mailing list. > > Sure - get the machinery to post patches. It's as easy in CVS as > anything else. > > > And the fact that a change either passed review or was rejected should be > > documented so that is accessible. > > We simply don't need formal machinery - the mailing list is good enough.
I would argue. First of all, the mailing is *not* devoted only to patches. If we had lyx-patches list, that would make more sense. But apparently we don't. And then changes get lost in the noise, people forget them, it's hard to dig things up at times, and so on. That's because a mailing list is just that -- a mailing list. It has nothing to do with software development management. It can be abused for that purpose, but to me it doesn't make sense if there are good tools that were developed just for that purpose (actually, Aegis is a bit more than SCM). And a lot of the information in the mailing list is unaccessible without special tools, like archives, search-in-the-archive, etc. E.g. to see how a certain problem was attacked, what patches were submitted, and how it wound up, in Aegis you simply list the details of a change. Using a mailing list, if you don't actually read all the messages, you're depending on your luck, people's ability to use meaningful subjects, and your ability to formulate proper search terms in order to dig things out of the archive. I guess that's where you really have a lot of overhead to just see what was being done about a change, right? Obviously, one can and should still discuss things on the mailing list, it's just that with Aegis - you can refer to a particular change number, you don't have to repeat what the change is (you can put all the clean and nice description into the change, and then on the list you just send a mail with a subject "whaddya think of C094? -- and it's easy for everybody to look what's it about, without you having to repeat same thing in the changelog, on the list, etc.) - you have locality of reference -- if you're working on the repository, you have all your related information on hand, without even *having* to use your mail client [myself, I find it worthwhile shutting my KMail down as soon as I feel that I'm gonna spend more time reading the mailing lists than workin on a given day] - it's very easy to split a change into separate issues, if the discussion turns out to indicate that "it's really 3 different problems" - (note) even if somebody is on the windoze, there's the read only web interface to aegis, so you can always see what the change is all about -- so you're not forced to have a unix box available (locally or remotely) just to see what's going on I should also probably point out, that with Aegis the disk space and time overhead of trying out a thing three different ways on three different branches scales with the complexity of your change, and not with the complexity of the project. So if you have say 40 megs and a couple thousand inodes left on your filesystem, you could still create about two or three LyX changes, every of them in a different branch (say 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4) and compile them. Try that with CVS. Wish ya luck. Cheers, Kuba Ober
