Re: Quality control and FOSS rant

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Hi Andy,

> > Comments and criticisms welcome.
> >   
> I suppose this is more of a troll than a criticism, sorry about that.
> 
> > Classpath bugs don't
> > have such administration issues due to
> > its longer history as a FOSS project and existing community-oriented fun
> > development paradigm.
> Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Classpath lacks the basic 
> quality controls that OpenJDK has?

Classpath and most FOSS projects for that matter work differently, but
still surprisingly well. From my experience with Classpath I can only
say the following:

- We have an extensive unit testsuite (Mauve) that has been developed
alongside with Classpath. Many bugs got a corresponding Mauve test and a
couple of regressions have been caught that way. While not beeing
mandadory for any patch to go in, many developers have taken the
responsibility to write tests and look out for regressions before
committing. Of course, that has not always been the case, I am myself
guilty of quickly checking in code that has not been checked that way.
- The quick turnaround between the Classpath developers and users
resulted in a much more efficient handling of bugs (IMO). This, together
with the first point, has helped _a_lot_ to keep the overall quality
suprisingly high, despite the apparent lack of formal processes (except
the ones that Mark already mentioned).

That whole discussion is probably interesting but mostly pointless. Both
approaches (closed and open) apparently tend to produce relatively high
quality code (or really crappy code, happens in both camps), where with
the closed approach the developers (or vendors) have to take over 100%
responsibility (because the end user has no way to interact with the
development), which usually makes things very formal and slow, where the
open approach relies very much on the end users reporting problems. In
most active projects these are fixed really quickly, giving both the
developers and the end users a warm fuzzy feeling ;-) Labelling FOSS as
playground for bored developers is, uhm, strange. But yeah, now that
Classpath has lost most of its end users, we might end up like that ;-)
I don't care, I'll continue anyway.

Cheers, Roman
-- 
http://kennke.org/blog/



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