On Sun, Aug 05, 2012 at 03:00:04PM -0400, Ted Unangst wrote: > I will add a somewhat controversial viewpoint to the mix. Because cvs > makes working with branches and large diffs so painful, it forces > developers to split their work into smaller pieces. In OpenBSD, > that's a good thing. Keeping your changes in a private fork is > difficult, which is good. It means fewer private forks. If every > developer could maintain a branch with some private tweaks, and not > bother integrating their changes or fixing regressions, progress would > grind to a halt. [I have mentioned this to people before and their > eyes just about popped out of their head. I don't expect > everyone to agree.]
I don't find this controversial, except the notion that sticking with blunt tools to solve a human/procedural problem is a good idea. It also doesn't work, even if it appears to work: how many devs have I heard talk about a local tree they've maintained for a long time with changes that haven't yet gone in? Quite a few. When the changes go in, they come in small chunks, but the long-lived forks exist. Small commits are largely preferred by pretty much all of the sensible people I know, and OpenBSD culture clearly prefers/demands them. I'd be surprised if giving people sharper tools would do much harm. > github is all about social coding and they have a point. But many > of the things they enable are considered antisocial in the OpenBSD > development process. There can be public read-only git without github, and I'd think self-hosting would be a much better fit for OpenBSD.
