Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Some issues

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Michael Poole <address@hidden>

    >> More than 1200 changesets per month.

    > Surely you jest.  How many projects in the world have that kind of
    > changeset rate?

GCC and the kernel are in that ballpark.

Nobody's tree is every really up-to-date when the commit rate is that
high but that's ok -- it just means that people are always a few
revisions behind in testing but that testing and further development
proceed concurrently.

Essentially, the impossible-to-keep-up-with branch becomes the sight
of semi-automated continuous integration and integration testing.

(See my previous message for a long answer about how arch can support
this style of development very well.  Better than CVS.)


    > I am not even sure that gcc has that many, although Linux probably
    > does.  Out of the ten most active SourceForge projects, seven seem to
    > use CVS there.  None of them have a commit rate anywhere near that
    > high[1]: the closest is under 600 commits per month, followed by 250
    > commits per month and 160 commits per month.

    > [1] gaim has 13529 commits in 4.5 years, azureus has 605 in one year,
    > eGroupWare has 1082 in one year, phpMyAdmin has 19986 in 3 years,
    > winmerge has 1247 in 3.5 years, xoops has 4915 in 2.5 years, and
    > TightVNC has 918 in 4 years.

Any project that gets:

        1) big enough to have lots of separate parts that can be
           hacked independently

        2) popular enough to generate submissions

you'll have a change rate coming into the mainline at least 1200
commits/month large.  Now if you want to handle that inflow with a
process of continuous integration (and who doesn't, usually!)q, then
you have a 1200+ commit/month branch.

-t