Subject: Re: the abiword-cvs proposal
From: Sam TH (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 07 2001 - 18:13:15 CST
On Wed, Feb 07, 2001 at 04:05:13PM -0800, Paul Rohr wrote:
> I don't want to waste a -1 until I understand what problem the proposal is
> intended to solve.
>
> We currently have two views of the flow of changes to the tree:
>
> 1. A complete, terse list of every single change in CVS and Bonsai.
> 2. An edited flow of more lengthy "commit -- " messages to abiword-dev.
>
> Both are archived and searchable. The main differences I can see are:
>
> - only the latter gets automatically "pushed" to my inbox
> - that's the stuff a human edited for me to see today
>
> The proposal seems to be to remove flow #2 from the rich context of
> abiword-dev, and replace it with an automatic push of flow #1. That seems
> like such a clear loss that I must be missing something here. I'm still not
> sure who this would benefit.
>
> Off the cuff, my guess is that it really only benefits people who don't want
> to see anything about commits at all, but I don't see the point of that.
Ok, here's how I see it.
1) Writing commit emails is annoying. Not in the sense of having to
do it, but of having to stop in the middle of working, and copy and
paste some stuff to my email client. By contrast, I can just hit C-x
C-q in emacs, and get the changes committed automatically. So this
would remove that.
2) You get to see all the commits. This isn't much of a problem, with
the possible exception of Thomas.
3) People should write what they write in the email into the CVS log.
That would remove the possibility of you getting less interesting info
in your email.
4) [this is the big benifit for me] You get to see what actually
happens to the code, right in your email. For me, email is nice and
easy for this. Also, it tends to promote people looking at the code
other people commit, and then commenting on it. This is something
that doesn't happen nearly enough on this project.
For a look at how these emails might look, check out
http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-cvs/current/
That said, the major problem seems to be people for who the additional
email would be a big burden. I don't see a good solution for that.
It's also worth noting that most projects that use this don't have the
neat web tools we have.
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
GnuPG Key:
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/key
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