[gst-devel] GStreamer needs a maintainer

[Leif Johnson]

Hi -

Comments below ...

On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 07:53, Ronald Bultje wrote:

> Hi Thomas & Benjamin & gang,
>
> > On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 16:31, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> >
> > Incidentally, the question "Why can't you guys use ChangeLog's like
> > a real project" is an often heard outsider question. And I
> > completely agree. Why anyone would think the sorry excuse of "check
> > cvs commit logs" is valid is beyond me :) I can understand though
> > the reason of being too lazy to update the ChangeLog, which is also
> > fine by me. It's just not my style. I love ChangeLogs for looking up
> > changes.
>
> I can answer this one: it doesn't work. I've tried it in the
> beginning, marking every change in the ChangeLog and committing it
> (this was long before I entered GStreamer, so previous projects). The
> bad thing is that *every single commit* by someone else would cause a
> CVS conflict in the ChangeLog file, because I had a bunchload of
> changes there too.

I've noticed this as well. ChangeLogs seem more useful to me as ways of
summarizing important changes at release time to people outside the
project, basically a coder's version of the release notes. Developers
who aren't up to speed on project development can read the ChangeLog to
see what's changed from the previous releases. If we had more frequent
GStreamer releases then using the ChangeLog more would be even better ;
it seems like Thomas is trying to head in that direction somewhat, which
I think would be quality.

Internally, I've found that ChangeLogs are poor ways of keeping project
developers current on each others' development efforts : Keeping one
frequently-changed file up to date across several people's local copies
is a pain. Actually, I've found the gst-cvs list to be quite nice for
keeping up to speed on others' activities here.

But that doesn't mean ChangeLogs aren't useful or important ... we just
need to use whatever people find effective for keeping up to date with
GStreamer changes (ooh, ooh, mailing lists ! :).

leif

p.s. I'll be on vacation (away from the gf) for a week and a half soon
... lots of time to hack !

-- 
Leif Morgan Johnson : http://ambient.2y.net/leif/