[gst-devel] cvs use

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hey guys,

I'm sending this mail because I'm starting to feel the current way of
and rate of committing to CVS is scaring me senseless.  In the past we
used to have a pretty healthy habit of mailing the list in advance,
warning them of changes about to happen, why we need them, what they
solve, and some sort of "random" design document.

Right now, people are only discussing some stuff on IRC at best,
committing, breaking the build for days, implementing new stuff while
the build is still broken, and so on.  There is no quality control
whatsoever, no way to check if the changes make sense except for reading
code, and no push towards a good design.   And all of this right when
everyone decides we need to get into GNOME 2.6, which means we need
everything bugfree in five months (!).

I think it's time to rediscuss some of the policies we need to adopt to
make this goal achievable. having our project spin completely out of
control is not a good way IMO to achieve this goal.  In my mind, I'm
hoping we can get to a better level of quality control than we used to
have in the not-to-distant past, which included things like daily builds
of CVS and testsuite runs, and keeping the build compilable at all
times.  I would want to add more checks to these, like the automated
media test, and more regression tests, and so on.  But first of all, I
would like to know what other people think we need, because it's not
going to work unless we manage to agree on what level of quality we want
to achieve.

So, thoughts ? Or should I just say something on IRC and then commit a
POLICY doc to CVS, following the new commit culture ? :)

Thomas