Re: source repository

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > > Don't you still completely lack any policy about how things will be
 > > handled in the future except "Richard will decide, after hearing the
 > > advice of other developers"?

 > I don't see how a piece of software, any software, can resolve
 > personal problems of this kind.

It's not a "personal problem", it's Richard's style, reflecting his
constraints as a manager with many responsibilities besides Emacs.  If
it works for him as maintainer, and Richard as maintainer works for
the developers, where's any "problem"?

But there is an *opportunity* to improve here.

How could a better SCM help to improve the process?  The point is that
with a SCM which has no concept of "trunk" and which is very helpful
to merges among branches, the maintainer's decision timing becomes
irrelevant to communication of on-going development among the regular
developers.  The limiting factor becomes an individual's resources to
manage her own workspaces rather than the maintainer's decision to
open or close a primary channel of communication.  It also enables
workers who are only weakly connected to the Internet to keep
reasonably up-to-date with *all* branches, and have *full* access to
history and other metadata even though the official repository is
inconvenient or inaccessible.

These primary channels, ie the nominal trunk and the release process,
will remain the primary channels to the outside world, and remain
under control of the maintainer.  However, by using an appropriate
SCM, it is possible to separate the issue of day-to-day communication
among developers from the issue of what to release when.