[Opensim-dev] to branch or to break?

[Sean Dague]

On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 02:40:48PM +0000, Michael Wright wrote:
> I really think we have to do something. As I have spent the morning
> trying to do somethings but not getting anywhere because I'm so
> worried about breaking something else. I know Stefan feels exactly the
> same. It really is harming development with people running deployed
> grids and regions from trunk. Where it results in us not being able to
> do any thing major that has risks. I think this is even part of the
> reason that the project has slowed down in development over the last
> month. It feels like we are now in small bug fix/small change
> mode. When the code just isn't mature enough for that. We still don't
> know how a lot of things will need to work in the end. I think this
> project still needs to be in err more of a risk taking mode.

Agreed, risk taking is very good.  I feel opposite on the grid front.
Pulling from SVN head means you are alpha or worse.  All the opensim
grids at this point should realize they are bug hunters attempting to
accelerate the project, and there are going to be bumps and bruises
along the way.

I do think the project has changed phases a bit, in the fact that there
are now enough developers that talking about a new major approach before
doing it leads to a lot of value, especially as most developers don't
have the whole project in their heads.  Something as tricky as new
interregion coms will benefit a lot from some discussion upfront,
especially in how it interacts with physics, scripting, etc.

>  By that I mean us programmers feel free do fix big things or make big
>  restructoring changes when needed without thinking that they can't
>  because it will take more than one commit and that means that its
>  hard to add half the implementation and still have everything
>  working. I actually think this is what most likely lead to Tleiades
>  loss (which I am sorry for being the one who did the commit that
>  caused him to lose that work), in that he was working on quite big
>  changes and it was hard to make commits before it was all finished
>  and still leave trunk in a fully working (as much as it every does)
>  state. If we said trunk can be broke then he could have made those
>  commits.

Right, though in that interim the physics guys wouldn't have anything
they could test on.

> I really strongly urge us to come up with a way of us being able to
> not feel scared of making changes. Else I worry for the future. I am
> very much in favour of Trunk being the place for active development,
> we just need to get people off the idea of updating to every new
> version of it. And just release "stable versions" in some way
> (tag/branch/ full binary release/whatever) every week or two (or
> three). 

One of the things that might help here would be to look into a
distributed source control system like mercurial.  That would make it
very easy to have lots of parallel trees on OpenSim where people could
have all kinds of experimental things going on.  It also allows for real
merging.

	-Sean

-- 
__________________________________________________________________

Sean Dague                                       Mid-Hudson Valley
sean at dague dot net                            Linux Users Group
http://dague.net                                 http://mhvlug.org

There is no silver bullet.  Plus, werewolves make better neighbors
than zombies, and they tend to keep the vampire population down.
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