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sm-grimoire - Re: [SM-Grimoire] Gnome section - Updating to Beta.

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Subject: Discussion of Spells and Grimoire items

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  • From: ""Jimmy Yen(顏孝杰)"" <jimmy AT yen.tp>
  • To: Hamish Greig <hgreig AT bigpond.net.au>
  • Cc: sm-grimoire AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Grimoire] Gnome section - Updating to Beta.
  • Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2003 03:06:34 +0800

I hate to get involved in this kind of things, but I guess I have to sound off if it's me who you are targeting?

I'm just trying to give out my humble user opinions and since my English is not good enough, don't think anything is offensive when it sounds that way. ;)

Hamish Greig wrote:

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STOP APOLIGISING FOR ME !!!
(Shouting and !!! intended)
Everything I said I meant. Just don't mistake my lack of patience for intentional abuse.

I thought I wanted to know what's intentional abuse, but not anymore...

We are losing developers at the rate of one per month. For the simple reason that we are already undermanned and overworked.
This was one of my primary reasons for suggesting we remove devel grimoire from easy public access.

Here's a little story for you. I fixed my broken ifup the day I updated my net-tools in test, and when I prepared to submit a bug next day I updated my grimoire and found a new, fixed version, with a history file indicating that it's fixed days before. I have also seen some bug reports that's "already fixed in devel." How does one know that if he doesn't have access to devel? And how did I need to duplicate the work myself if I could just check devel for the fix?

Now when you limit the access to devel you just take all the work with you, and there's no space left for user contributions anymore. How does an user become a developer if he can't make contributions first?

We don't have the man power to efficiently manage the full three grimoire structure, removing devel from public access allows us to a) Fix bugs straight in test (like we always should have been)
b) speed up the stable release cycle.
c) decrease guru's workload by only having to look at 2 versions of any spell.
d) get knowledgeable people (guru's) more directly involved with the users. Guru's are now interacting more directly with the users ( or should be if they are fixing bugs in test grimoire)
e) stop us chasing our own tails in the devel grimoire trying to fix bugs caused by incompatibilities with software major version updates, only to start from scratch when the next major update went in. Now we have a small buffer zone to test these major things without breaking too much.
Now the reason I shout and use !!! is not because i am actually angry but because no-one listens. (maybe exasperation is a good description)

I should have said this earlier, but I'm always listening. I just didn't bother to reply because I'm a very slow writer, and all these things I'm saying here must had been discussed before.

We/ I suggested this and took the time to discuss it for almost a month before the change was actually made. I emailed 40 developers and got responses from only 5 (truly pathetic), I moved it to the mail lists and got no extra discussion, I talked on IRC and got no negative feedback or comments. Now to me that means 90 % agreed with the proposal.

Maybe I'm one of the other 10%, but while I'm always reading the mailing list, IIRC when that appeared on the list it's already final. I think posting a proposal on the list first would have been much better, as some users like me don't even use IRC, and the change really only affects users.

AS i see it now it is quite simple.
a) if something has a stable release that works we support it.
b) if (due to compiler upgrade or software incompatibility) a stable release gets broken and a beta/alpha release is the fix then we will use it.
c) pre-stable releases are a different issue, if software hasn't hit the magic 1.X.X release then we will use whichever one is the best for us, whether it is 0.1 or 0.99
d) if you want the absolute cutting edge nothing is stopping you. You can manually change details or submit unstable spells to devel via whatever method you have (cvs, perforce, bugzilla)

In some cases (e.g. Mozilla) the release number really has nothing to do with
stability. I use CVS version of Mozilla just because I can get the bugfixes I
need before the .0 version finally arrives. (And of course I'm not stupid
enough to build it just after a major landing!)

I don't think we should be wasting our time with unstable releases IF the software has a stable alternative that works.

But how do you define "stable?" Is it stable if it builds on one developer's machine ? Is it stable if it builds on two developers' machines ? Is it stable if it runs for five minutes ? Is it stable if two people use it for a week ? ;)

No, no one can decide if a program is stable enough, at least not for everyone. And that's why we users need options to decide ourselves. I had never blindly done a sorcery --system-update even once on devel grimoire, when it was available to the public; I picked up individual spells to build instead. Now I just don't have that option anymore.

While, of course, as you guys have said a thousand times, that I can manually update DETAILS's and BUILD's my self, just do that on the whole gnome section to prove your argument. It sounds more like "We are not limiting the users to create their own distros."

Now if we need to revisit the issue and find some better development plan PLEASE start discussing it. I like open discussion, i don't like moaning and groaning after an uncontested change has been made. If you think the current approach is wrong then offer an alternative.

(I hear you moaning...)

Alright - here comes my suggestion. Last time I checked, Sorcerer only has one main grimoire. So why don't we dump a grimoire too, say, test grimoire?

In my past exprience, test is never stable enough to warrant a safe sorcery --system-update. It's not even stable for me, and I'd rather call it "late grimorie" now - a mirror of devel except for later updates and bugfixes. While people who want to use SMGL on production systems would go to stable, and people who use test wouldn't expect it to be stable, why not just dump test and make devel publicly accessible? Whenever a specific spell is not working people can always avoid to update it - that's how I used to be doing when devel was available. Major changes such as the recent init update can - and, IMHUO, should - always take place in a branch.

And now to test if anyone has actually read this ...
" I had sex with you girlfriend/ wife/ mother/ sister last night and she is dynamite in bed"
Thankyou

Well, good try.






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