[Opensim-dev] to branch or to break?

[Stefan Andersson]

I'm totally for letting trunk be 'always buildable but maybe not always functioning' - if people are concerned with stability they should start tag revisions as 'stable' - and tell people to use that.
 
Given how simple it is to tag revisions, it's amazing we don't do it. What lazy asses we are.
 
For example, at the moment, apparently osgrid can't be pushed past 2060, which means the regions on it can't be pushed past 2204 -
 
as much as we all want osgrid to move forward, we should really tag 2060 as osgrid-stable-grid-0.4 and 2204 as osgrid-region stable-0.4 and tell all people on osgrid to use THAT instead of trunk until we figure out what the hell is wrong.
 
Also, if we want to supply some kind of stable experience, we should start _branching_ as well, bugfixing for that branch and selectively merge the bugfix back into trunk. You want stability or latest features? You can't have both.
 
The situation we have now with the core devs (newbs and oldes) tip-toeing around, being afraid to introduce bugs, because anybody could be expected to pull trunk and run it is just absurd. Also, it leads to n00bs like myself not being able to learn by 'trial and error' because we don't tolerate error. And yes, I do mean 'trial by error' by committing - bughunting should be a community effort and thus a community learning experience.
 
/Stefan


Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 12:04:39 +0000From: michaelwri22 at yahoo.co.ukTo: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.deSubject: [Opensim-dev] to branch or to break?As some people know there has been some talk on what needs done for decent Communications. And also the partly related work on dynamically creating and removing regions at runtime. Trying to just make some changes to fix some problems with creating new regions (at other times than startup) is showing how hard it is to do much without the risk of breaking other things, like grid mode. And I think removing regions will be even worse as we don't have any way in place to tell the grid servers that a region has been removed. Two related things here are I most likely don't have the time to get all my changes working in grid mode straight away, so would like to be able to test them in standalone mode first. Also I am really not in favour of doing much work on the current grid mode code without at least some plan of how we want to take it forward. I think most of us are in agreement that the current protocol needs redesigning or at least big changes.Just trying to decouple some of these things is proving very hard. So I'm starting to think we are in a situation like we were with the move from 0.2 - 0.3. Where we need to either say that trunk may have some things broke in it for a while or we create a branch. Last time we went with a branch but think we all felt that we should have went with breaking trunk and creating a "stable" branch. So I think we need to decide, then we can get on with the talk about what actually needs done and how.


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