[Opensim-dev] breaking OpenSim.ini changes

[Mike Dickson]

On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 16:54 +0000, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> I want to send my personal thanks out to Melanie and Christine for
> their hard work!

I'll second that. It is good stuff and by the looks of it helps to
improve the overall architecture considerably.

> I would like to add my 2 cents for those who will have it:
> 
> - OS should have time-based releases: where there is a time for big
> changes, followed by some stabilization, followed by a tag,
> rinse-repeat

Common practice in lots of projects.  Look at Xen for instance (a
project I'm very familiar with).  Development on unstable moving to a
feature freeze. Some stabilization drops and finally to a "release".
I'd describe unstable as Charles' best effort.  Mostly useable but
occasionally broken for short periods. They use a distributed source
control system so most real "breaking" development happens in private
trees with pulls from unstable to stay in sync until a changeset is
ready.  Once it is, its pushed to unstable in the form of patches that
can be reviewed by the community at large.

> - trunk is for developers; branches should be for long-term
> experiments or destabilizations -- essentially more than one release
> cycle

Like unstable above.  The distributed source model does help IMO since I
can share my tree with others if needed.  The Xen model tolerates some
pretty big architectural additions but there's still effort in what goes
into their HEAD since there are multiple development streams against it
at any given time.

> - deployment should be done from tags, never trunk

Right, completely agree, hopefully with some rc drops so others can kick
the tires (and to handle bug fixes against the rc candidate which can be
folded back into the trunk).

> - OS should change it's official status from alpha to beta software,
> and take stabilization and releases more seriously

Others have already weighed in negatively on this but I'd agree with
beta. It IMO a measure of confidence in use and for good or ill the
OpenSim project is getting real use.  That being said I think the beta
moniker and the extra discipline in development would help build
confidence in that user base (and help neew developers that might want
to contribute come on board).

Just my 2 cents.

Mike