Development model/versioning stuff: Interesting essay on why
decentralised versioning is a bad idea
Mike McCormack
mike at codeweavers.com
Fri Aug 13 05:39:15 CDT 2004
Mike Hearn wrote:
> http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/thoughts/bitkeeper.whynot
>
> What are peoples thoughts on this? It's not (despite appearances) an
> argument against BitKeeper due to licensing concerns, but rather a short
> paper on why the author believes the "pyramid" patch/development system
> is a bad idea.
From the article:
"For Linux, the consequences of these limitations have been slow and
unpredictable release schedules, poor stability of release branches,
and a lack of important standards (for instance, no consistent kernel
module ABI or even API within a release branch)."
I think that the above is incorrect... IMO:
* mainline linux kernels have not been unstable. Kernels released by
distros, which are presumably done with multiple committers are far more
unstable than that released by Linus.
* the kernel->user space ABI is extremely stable. The internal kernel
ABI is not stable, because supporting 3rd drivers is not a goal of Linux.
The release schedule of the kernel is slightly irregular, but I don't
think that it's holding back development.
The advantage of having a single maintainer is that it reduces the level
of politics in the project. We follow Alexandre's goals, which I think
are pretty clear and consistent. Multiple maintainers would have
multiple goals, and thus create conflict. There's always the option to
fork the project if you think that you have a better way of doing
things, but nobody has successfully done that so far.
The current development model for Wine is achieving good results. I
don't think there's any need to mess with it. CVS has it's problems
(mostly for maintainers), but there's no better tool at the moment.
Mike
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