On Dec 31, 2007, at 6:33 AM, Richard Lowe wrote: > Alan Coopersmith <Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM> writes: >> Roy T. Fielding wrote: >>> Take their bits >>> somewhere else -- have the OGB set up a community that reflects >>> where >>> the organization is supposed to be heading instead of what it used >>> to look like in the past. If we can't do that because we still >>> don't >>> have an Hg instance, then the OGB should put an end to that long- >>> running >>> farce once and for all -- mandate Subversion across all of >>> OpenSolaris >>> whether you like it or not. >> >> At this point, mandating Subversion would greatly delay the >> availability >> of the external gates - all the work done to make the various >> build and >> integration tools work with Mercurial would be thrown away and >> another >> year spent redoing it to work with Subversion instead. > > As someone particularly familiar in this area, I feel compelled to > comment, if only to say that Alan is largely correct.
How about updating some of the SCM pages to reflect the current status http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/scm/ and then put a link to them on the front page and downloads page? I had to do a search for Mercurial in order to find them at all. If the gate really is operational at this point, then my remark about Subversion does not apply. >> The problem with the gate conversions is not the technology being >> moved to - >> we could have gone live with Mercurial long ago if it was only the >> process >> of setting up repositories that had to be done - it's the >> integration with >> the rest of the process and tools that is taking time. > > That's largely true, but not entirely. I don't see any point in > elaborating in this discussion, however. > > If you, the OGB, feel that this is all our (SCM)'s fault, you are, of > course, free to fix that in any way you so choose. > > But if you really think it will alter this farce in any material way, > you're fools. The farce is the continuing year-over-year excuses for the development not being done in the open. Only one of those excuses was SCM. We should have mandated Subversion from day one (which required no additional tool integration) and continually reevaluate things like Mercurial as we gained experience with open development. Instead, we now have a tradition of doing everything ass-backwards while Mercurial was being reinvented, and some folks actually think that ass-backwards is the *process* that we are supposed to be following instead of the one that the OGB/Sun/community officially ratified last year. It is nice to know that there is finally some progress showing on an actual onnv-gate (though I would hope that the Nevada name would go away sometime soon). That is the kind of news I'd like to see on the front page. My problem is this perceived need to keep everything hidden from the public until Sun's closed environment and internal process is ready. Until the actual development-in-progress is visible and accessible to the community, the community can't do working reviews in public and we haven't accomplished diddly squat. And what happens when we find out that many of those process tools are no longer applicable to the open development process? We'll have to rewrite them anyway. Thanks for all the hard work being done, but we don't get the benefit of open development until we actually use them for community work. I'd rather have an empty repository with no tools than wait for all the tools to catch up. ....Roy
