[Opensim-dev] to branch or to break?

[Stefan Andersson]

> > 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.
*sigh*
 
1) Big is bad. Keep your changes small.
2) Commit often.
 
> > 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.
Distributed source control seems promising; anybody here has real experience in working on a 15-dev project with it?
 
My immediate black hat reaction is that I don't buy the 'merging is easier' bit at all. Diff is still Diff. Also, I'd say that it even makes some merging scenarios even worse, with everybody having to create merges between their own set of patches, that then has to be re-re-merged into the official branch, but maybe it's just me not having any experience with it.
 
/Stefan
 
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