[sugar] A philosophical question

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Sun, 11 Feb 2007, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:

> Um, speaking as a Gentoo user, that's last bullet is a strange statement. 
> The problem seems to be that you guys seem to be building from *head* on some 
> huge number of projects (I say seem to be because I just wound up having to 
> give up trying to get sugar installed due to broken builds).  That would 
> require very high discipline on all of the projects to make it work.
>
> If you had your build environment use a tag/revision in the source control 
> system for each project and only update the version used when your core 
> developers *know* that the new version has built and run on a couple of dozen 
> boxes you'd have a far greater chance of getting new developers built without 
> problems.  In short, you'd have a testing tag and a stable tag for each 
> component.
>
> Someone who just wants to use the environment (i.e. almost *all* new 
> developers) could then build the stable tags, someone who wants to work with 
> the latest and greatest could use the testing tags and contribute to the 
> testing of them by their building.  When everyone is building head in all 
> these projects, by contrast, you are basically having every new developer 
> build a different piece of software, with no idea whether what they are 
> building is actually usable.  Given that new developers are *new*, and thus 
> unlikely to know whether they are seeing a failure in their usage or the code 
> itself, knowing that what they are trying to do is *possible* is a great help 
> for them.
>
> Sure, someone might get code that's 2 or 3 weeks out of date, but if they are 
> working on a particular module, they'd set their tag to "HEAD" for that piece 
> and be on the bleeding edge for that piece.

+1.  Especially since this is precisely what Sugar users end up 
replicating -- the hard way.  I'm building Sugar in its entirety, every 
day, and whenever I find a build that "works", I use it for a while.

Requires some additional overhead to determine what Sugar builds are 
stable, of course -- and when you're moving rapidly in HEAD, that can be 
difficult.

--g

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