Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: in-tree pristines fatally wounded (merge-fest etc)

[Charles Duffy]

On Wed, 2003-12-03 at 11:21, Samuel A. Falvo II wrote:
> arch encourages a development model which is antithetical to the way most 
> businesses work, I think.  Support for star-merging greatly reduces the 
> political influence of the "repository maintainer," as people in the 
> development group can star-merge directly from each other, completely 
> circumventing the repository maintainer.  Then, when the repository 
> maintainer needs to perform an integration, there may be a module that 
> (s)he doesn't want star-merged with something that (s)he does want, 
> which can lead to increased integration times, and woe is he, additional 
> work to weed out the changes (s)he doesn't want.

I'm not really sure this is an issue. I discussed arch with the lead
developer on my team at one point, and while it appears that it won't be
used here for other (largely political) reasons, distributed development
support was generally considered a Good Thing once it was communicated
how this supported -- and the easy branching/merging was gravy (such
that we could have a branch for items that have passed the test cases,
items which have passed the full QA process, etc). That is to say: After
discussion of how arch could be used to support our internal process,
the fact that it *could* be used to support said internal processes was
taken as an advantage.

(Of course, this is a *lead developer* -- who happens to have the power
to decide which revision control tools to use -- rather than a "manager"
-- whose suggestions on the topic would be shot down by the executives
in a heartbeat if enough respected members of the technical staff
informed said executives that management was wrong. Most good
organizations, I would hope, will likewise put such decisions in the
hands of people who actually know what they're talking about rather than
those who don't).

(Yes, we're hiring -- but the pay's mostly stock, the application's
written in Java, and we need folks willing to move to Texas).