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Abram Hindle's Blog, The Personal Blog Of Abram Hindle
Abram Hindle
abezblog@abez.ca
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Sun, 17 Sep 2006
Subject: New Use for the Research Blog
Alas I rarely update the research blog.
I think I will now it use to store bookmarks related to software evolution and other interests.
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bs...
The important part of this interview related to my work is the promotion of commit policies as good software development practice. Especially for open source where if you commit unfinished code it ruins compiles for many people.
I think commit policies are great for the development tree but I also think it highlights a failure of CVS. People use CVS to record revisions and act like a backup system. If people want to save their work for the day but have to follow a commit policy they can't commit their changes to the central repository. Sure they could use a branch but if you've ever used CVS you'll know that branching and merging are not fun at all. Thus an approach such as darcs or some versions of svk where you can have your local repository and then push all your changes when you are done is possibly better. It allows you to use version control on patches which are working on and then allows you to push these changes once you are done.
Regardless commit policies seem like a logical rule to enforce some semblence of software quality or even promote requirements such "the software always runs". This is an important quality for OAS in particular.