Re: Posting to hackers and patches lists

"Zdenek Kotala" <Zdenek(dot)Kotala(at)Sun(dot)COM> writes:

> Gregory Stark napsal(a):
>> "Josh Berkus" <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
>>
>>> How about hacking together a simple patch tracker instead, as Bruce
>>> suggested? I've never found e-mail to be a particularly good way to track
>>> patches.
>>
>> The thing is that we don't just want to "track" patches. We want to talk about
>> patches.
>
> I think we want to have both. If you have big patch you don't want go through
> all patch again and again when new version is released with only few changes.
> If you are able to have diff between two patch versions you are able preform
> easy check if all comments are already fixed.

Ah, that's not something a patch tracker or a mailing list would solve. There
is a tool that would solve this -- a revision control system.

We aren't using CVS the way it's really intended. If all this development
happened on branches then people could go look at the current version at any
point, not just when authors decide to announce it. And people could generate
diffs between the last time they looked at that branch and now etc.

Now the problem is that CVS sucks and creating branches is a heavyweight
operation which imposes a burden forever more. Also there is no access control
system so you cannot grant commit access to just one branch.

There are newer revision control systems where anyone can create a branch at
any time and keep it on their local machine. They fit our development model
much better than CVS when you include the development happening outside the
committers and the main tree.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
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