Re: mechanisms for reviews needed

[Mark D. Baushke]

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Jacob <address@hidden> writes:

> The main problem is that each developer is the sole responsible
> for the quality of the work commited.

This is not a problem. A developer should be judged on the quality of
the work they commit.

> This may work well in a small organization, or if the rules are strict
> and everyone extremely diciplined. In general this want be true.

It will work if you are talking about committed professionals or
contentious volunteers who care about the quality.

If you don't have such a team, you are doomed to failure in any case and
no source code system will do anything other than slow your productivity
to let you slowly bleed to death.

That said, you could always allow the novices in your organization to
commit, do after the fact code reviews and fire them or for them to send
suggested bug fixes to someone who can commit if they can't meet your
quality goals. That is a management solution to a management problem. If
you are not able to fire them or manage them properly, then you could
always stop them from doing commits using something like the cvs_acls
scripts.

However, at the end of the development cycle, you will eventually have
to commit something to your code base and trust someone. If you only
want to allow trusted folks to do commits, then have the untrusted folks
provide patches via bug reports in your favorite bug tracking system.

> CVS branching could be used, but that would be a hack. 

Not really. Many folks use branches to develop unstable code and when it
has proven itself, it is moved into the main trunk. It is one of the
basic ways of getting work done with many source control systems out
there.

> I'd want this as an integrated service in the VCS, but I see that your
> answer to my question is "no".

Then use VCS. Or use AEGIS which has the kind of work flow you want.

CVS is not the tool for everyone. It has many assumptions about how
concurrent development should operate. You have the sources and could
adapt it to your needs, but be careful that you can maintain what you
use.

> So let me restate it: Is there any plans for adding such a feature
> in CVS or Subversion?

Nope, there are no plans to add any kind of an intermediate staging area
to CVS commit at all. I doubt you will ever see this 'feature' in CVS in
a mainline net release... feel free to fork the code base if you need to
do something like it. Or, even better, use a tool that does what you
want out-of-the-box.

I will not pretend to speak for the subversion folks. Ask them
separately.

        -- Mark
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