[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [Patch] Add BOOL_VAL around ANDs

[Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa <vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Petr Baudis wrote:
> It appears to me that the development is getting more chaotic now.. (compared
> to situation in November/December) It looks there's not even clear consensus
> between the maintainers what're the current goals and what should we do now;

Funny how things change :-) Back then people were saying the maintainers
were stagnating and that in order to increase output to "save" Freeciv we
should turn into a Mozilla like anarchy. Now people think its chaotic. How
much things change in a couple of months ;-)

> like vasco commiting recently the patches in order to make g++ happy, or like
> you saying that cleanups are low-priority and we should focus on finishing
> features for 1.12.1 now (before about a month) (this apparently changed
> mysteriously and without any notice i cought; and I believe your previous
> opinion was much more correct).

Its only natural. People seldom have the same goals. At most they share a
common sub-set of goals. As long as these goals don't conflict with each
other, everything works well.

As of late i've been making debugging, speed improvements and minor
cleanups. This goes hand in hand with perceived user desires for better
performance and more stability. The cleanups done recently by the
maintainers involve no changes in outputed code. So they add (hopefully) no
new bugs. Raimar's patches in particular have enabled the squashing of some
insidious bugs in the code.

There is still time for one or two major features to be commited before
release, as long as there remains some time for debugging.

> IMHO we just need to review the patches and have some time for that (like 2
> days at least - after all, we don't hurry anywhere, do we?).  I had a little
> different opinion before two months, but now it looks like this doesn't work
> well; like the patches which got commited too soon after posted for review or
> which didn't posted for review at all (like the pointers stuff or all [or
> almost all] vasco's patches). It seems we have two or three (raimar, vasco and

Which pointer stuff? Excuse me for my swiss cheese brain <@:-)
And yes, i agree, i should post stuff to freeciv-dev more. Just don't ask
me to post 1 line patches :-)

> mike [he is at least interested in my job ;]) active maintainers now, so what
> about enforcing the policy that maintainer should never commit own patches?  I
> think we are getting into trouble now with this 'cleanups', changing too much
> things too fast.

Well there are commits and commits. Commits which don't change the outputed
code are no problem. The problem is stuff that changes the inner workings
of Freeciv. Parts that would break everything if they have a bug.

I believe useless red tape is a waste of neuron cycles. Having other
people commit someone else's patches doesn't seem warranted to me at this
time. The important factors to me are:

1) have you read & tested the code with a compile and some run cycles?
2) is it a big/messy patch? then post it and await for discussion.
3) be commited to what you do. if you introduce something into CVS you are
   responsible for it. if it still breaks for some reason, either clean it
   up immediatly before anything else or remove it from CVS.

I have tried to uphold these principles. When i introduced the impr_gen
patch which caused memory corruption (my fault not Ben's) i knew it should
break despite my testing (call it programmer's instinct) and so i commited
it at a Thursday. Why? Because of the weekend that's why. This way i
wouldn't disrupt the schedule of the other developers. I fixed the bugs
in 3 days. Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Do you honestly believe that i
could have achieved the same results in 3 days using the regular process?
Of course this shouldn't be done as standard practice, but i think certain
features warrant this practice.

The question is not if you will do mistakes. That always has a chance of
happening. The question is: will you clean the mess up afterwards?

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa