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Re: source mgt. requirements solicitation
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 11:26:01PM -0800, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> Linux is a large project - 4.3 million lines of code - but only one
> person has commit privileges on the official tree, for any given
> release branch. No matter how good their tools are, this cannot be
> expected to scale, and indeed it does not. I have not actually
> measured it, but the appearance of the traffic on linux-kernel is that
> Linus drops patches on the floor just as often as he did before he
> started using Bitkeeper. However, Bitkeeper facilitates other people
> maintaining their own semi-official versions of the tree, in which
> some of these patches get sucked up. That is bad. It means users
> have to choose between N different variants; as time goes by it
> becomes increasingly difficult to put them all back together again;
> eventually will come a point where critical feature A is available
> only in tree A, critical feature B is available only in tree B, and
> the implementations conflict, because no one's exerting adequate
> centripetal force.
> Possibly I am too pessimistic.
Actually, the model used for Linux provides substantial freedom. Since
no single site is the 'central' site, development can be fully
distributed. Changes can be merged back and forth on demand, and
remote users require no resources to run, other than the resources to
periodically synchronize the data.
Unfortunately -- this freedom (as always) comes with a price. The
price is that the fully distributed model means that there is no
enforced regulation. There is no control, and the same freedom that
allows anybody to create a variant, allows them to keep a variant.
The models are substantially different, however, I would suggest that
neither is wrong in the generic sense.
The only questions that really matters are: 1) are you more
comfortable in a regulated environment, and if so, then 2) are you
willing to live with the limitations that a regulated environment
gives you? Some of these limitations include the need to maintain
contact with a central repository of some sort, and the need for
processing at a central repository of some sort.
Personally, I'm with you in that I prefer regulation and enforcement.
It keeps me from fsck'ing up my own data.
mark
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