Upstart 1.0 development branch

[Scott James Remnant]

On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 14:47 -0400, Kevin Hunter wrote:

> At 4:29am -0400 on Tue, 14 Apr 2009, Scott Remnant wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-04-14 at 00:42 -0700, Saravanan Shanmugham (sarvi) wrote:
> >> I saw the plan/roadmap presentation for 1.0, but i could not figure
> >> out which branch in lauchpad its being done on.
> 
> > I'm developing the next version of Upstart largely in private at the
> > moment, so you won't find it on Launchpad.
> > 
> > I realise that this is somewhat unusual for an Open Source project, but
> > this next version is almost a complete new attempt at a second "first
> > version" and I want to get particular basics right before releasing the
> > code for others to work on.
> 
> This ran across my desk this afternoon.  I was reminded of this email
> from a couple of weeks ago.  (Thank goodness for web archives of email
> discussions!)
> 
> http://producingoss.com/en/setting-tone.html#avoid-private-discussions
> 
> Food for thought ...
> 
I think you're all blowing things way out of proportion.

Upstart was released very early in its development cycle, and has had
public revision control system branches, etc. since the very beginning.
Even before that, I widely circulated the specs and plans for it.

For the last two years, the current code has been very stable while
we've had a huge amount of public discussion about the way forward -
both on this list, but mostly on the IRC channel.

So I think it's pretty public and open, with no "Private Discussions".


In any Open Source project, it's quite normal for a developer to go off
and do their own thing for a while before submitting or landing the
code.  This is especially and triply true if they're doing some
fundamental changes and don't actually know whether they'll work.

Right now I'm rewriting most of the heart of Upstart.  I don't know
whether this a good idea or not, I certainly don't know whether the
result will be better.

It's definitely not buildable yet, you can compile certain bits and run
some test cases and expect them to pass or fail depending on the code.


I don't agree that having more developers work on a single piece of code
somehow magically improves productively.  I'm following things down a
particular rabbit hole that interests me.  If I have to stop and try and
explain the changes I'm trying to make to others, so they can do it for
me, and then review their work afterwards then things are going to take
much longer.

Open Source doesn't work that way anyway.  Having a large developer
community means that there are more developers to follow /their own/
particular rabbit holes and improve the project in many different
directions at once.


This sudden need for urgency and rush confuses me.  Upstart has been
stable for two years now, in that time anyone could have done the work
I'm doing now.

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?
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