> When Gimp first moved to CVS, and access to the source tree went from a > strong central maintainer to many people with CVS access, the reason I was > told that it would work is that if something is committed that the > community agrees is not what it wants, the whole of the patch can be > reverted with a single command. The problem, from what I understand, was that this also would have reverted the following patch committed. Also they wanted to keep useful parts of prof's commit. > What I do think is important is that all major changes (yes, even major > changes by Sven and Mitch) should be discussed before commiting (and even > better, before a significant amount of effort is invested). Preferably, > it should be discussed on both the mailing list and IRC, with any relevant > points made on IRC echoed to the newsgroup (we all get mail and can read > it at our convience, but only Yosh reads the stuff in #gimp 24/7) I was under the impression that Sven and Mitch were the official maintainers of CVS HEAD and have been for a while. Therefore others should discuss extensive intended changes with them before committing. Also you aren't supposed to commit stuff that will break other stuff. Which apparently at least some of those changes did. The overall plan of Mitch and Sven's work has been discussed and is available in the todo file in CVS. > I certainly don't want to disparge those that work actively on Gimp, > especially Sven and Mitch. The contributations that all have made are > very valuable. But I have to wonder if Sven and Mitch don't consider Gimp > to have become thier own personal toy, and this overly harshly toned > critism of Daniel's code is a good example of this. Continuing this > pattern will do nothing to further Gimp in any real way, but will serve > quite well to drive away the few developers that Gimp has left. > > And to think that only a handful of months ago I wondered why the > excitment and number of gimp developers had died down so much... Mitch and Sven obviously do not consider it their own personal toy and do not behave that way at all. What they do do is take responsibility. They drive the development of GIMP. They take care of an awful lot of stuff. They are helping me through my proofing, which is doing a lot of nice clean up in the stuff. They also take time to double check my patches before I commit to make sure I haven't unknowingly broken something. Kelly has been doing extensive work on the tile manager. Bolsh does a lot of stuff. A lot of people do a lot of stuff, but I think most would be lost without the guiding force of mitch and sven. Nothing in their post in any way justified Daniel's response. They told him what they did and why and put it on the list to make the reasons clear to everyone. This ensures that a mistake will not be repeated. Considering the circumstances, and other recent events from what I understand, it is only reasonable to request that Daniel post his patches before committing. When I started proofing, definitely a major project, I let everyone on the list know so it wouldn't interfere with other things (like translations). It only makes sense for others to announce their big projects as well. Mitch and Sven's projects are clearly explained in the todo. They're redoing everything basically. I think their concerns about maintaining a workable development environment are completely justified and ridiculous responses like Daniel's are out of line. bex
