[tei-council] F2F Duke

[Martin Holmes]

On 14-11-10 03:13 PM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> i think you’re assuming a hierarchy, Martin,
> of  One-Linus-to-bind-us-with-one-ring. I think Peter
> is imagining peer review, where commits from each of us
> are checked by someone else, and we all have equal
> power (with which comes equal responsibility, i believe).

Yes, I was assuming a hierarchy; but if there isn't one, then we end up 
with a situation where nobody can get any work done because they need 
their last commit to be OKed by someone else before they can carry on, 
and no-one is available. How much fun would development be for you at 
midnight when you're on a roll, if you had to wait for someone else to 
approve every commit to the Stylesheets repo?

What this would encourage is that, rather than committing your work in a 
series of sensible modules that are easily understood and debugged, 
people would roll up a huge number of changes into one big commit; then 
the scale of the thing would make it daunting to anyone who had to check 
and merge it.

Also, one purpose of Jenkins is to provide a solid testing environment 
so that committers don't need the entire machinery of the build process 
on e.g. their iPad to make a change; they can let Jinks do the heavy 
lifting. Even if you wait a day for me to OK your commit, when it gets 
to Jenkins it's only marginally less likely to break the build anyway.

> I like the idea, not to catch people being evil or stupid,
> but just because its almost always the case that
> what one does can be improved by showing it to someone else.

That's definitely true, but I think the time for that is during ticket 
discussions; by the time we've decided something should be done 
(something significant, anyway), we should also have decided how it 
should be done, with the mechanics spelled out in as much detail as the 
implementer needs.

> i dont feel that strongly, tho.

I think I do, on this one.

Cheers,
Martin