So what next?

[Stuart Anderson]

On Tue, 13 Apr 2004, Egbert Eich wrote:

> 1. I'm not sure if those conference calls should be the basis of this
>    decision as they don't seem to represent the majority of developers.

It was representative of the majority of developers that were participating
at the time.

>    Although I ask how the group could have reached a consensus when
>    the majority of the people of the group have not even looked at the
>    code.

The decision, was to declare a long term goal. There wan't much code to look
at at the time, which is why the caveat was allowed that this was not a
do-or-die situation. If the decision turned out to be obviously wrong, it
would be reversed.

My point in bringing this up was to let everyone know that this decision
was made to set this as a goal, and that they would be rehashing old ground
if we went all the way back to the begining. Instead, I would rather see
everyone focus on answering the outstanding questions, and proving that it
was a good decisions. I think this would be more productive than backing up
and questioning our own decisions.

If the answers to the questions are not satisfactory, then the question can
be raised as to wether we should reverse the decision. The answers still need
some come first, either way.

> 2. Furthermore I seem to remember that the consensus was that it is too
>    erly to make a final decision since not everything seemed to have
>    stabilized at the time this was discussed.

There has been some question as to the timing of when to switch to a modular
release, but I don't think the goal of switching to a modular release has
really been in questions.

> 3. We need to distinguish between a modular build environemnt and
>    the choice of tools to achive this. Having a rough consensus on
>    the former one doesn't necessarily mean that everybody agrees on
>    the latter one.

It should be possible to use different tools to pull together the different
modules. I think the agreement on the current tool is based on the fact that
it seems to work "well enough". That certainly doesn't stop someone from
building a new tool that does the job better.

>
>  >
>  > There may be a couple of things that are yet unproven, so we should clearly
>  > identify what these are, and push to prove them to everyones satisfaction.
>
> There are definitly a bunch of things that I've brought forward that
> haven't been answered.

I think we are much more knowledgable about the modular tree now, and can
provide meannigful answers to the outstanding questions.

> The choice of build tools - which I consider suboptimal for our purposes -
> has been made by a small group not representing the majority of developers
> and it's possible that it doesn't even meet the needs of those who have
> not been involved.

The decision was made by those that were putting forth the effort to get
the work done. That doesn't seem to be unreasonable, nor does it preclude
further discussion about a better tool.

> I don't think it is that easy. For some people there are other conditions
> to be met than just build the tree in a straight forward and semi-automated
> way.

These requiments may have not been heard by the right people at the right
time. Reiterating them now would be helpful.


                                Stuart

Stuart R. Anderson                               anderson at netsweng.com
Network & Software Engineering                   http://www.netsweng.com/
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