Hi Cyrus,
On Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:14:34 -0800, Cyrus Harmon ch-tbnl@bobobeach.com wrote:
Thanks for the new releases. I hate to be a pest about this, and I think this was covered before, but I can't remember the answer. Is there any way we could convince you to host hunchentoot's source in a publicly accessible source code control system? I'd love to be able to just do a diff against the repository to see what has changed.
Don't remember if this has been covered before, but I'll try to give an elaborate answer this time so I can refer to it later... :)
1. I use CVS mostly as a convenient backup mechanism for myself, so I can revert to previous versions if I broke something or restore code that I accidentally dismissed. I don't write clever change comments (in fact, I usually don't write any except something like "..." to appease Emacs), so the CVS history looks pretty boring. I do tag releases, but that's about it.
2. I have everything on my laptop which I regularly also use to work in coffee bars or trains where I don't have Internet access. Every source control system that will be publicly accessible won't be accessible to /me/ in these situations.
3. I wouldn't want to set up /any/ source control system on one of my own servers, because I wouldn't want to cope with more potential security risks. Yes, I could use common-lisp.net, but although they're doing a great job their uptime in the last year hasn't been outstanding.
4. I believe in the "release often" mantra, i.e. as soon as there's a new feature or a bugfix it is given a release number and pushed out of the door - you're not missing out on stuff that's lying around in my local repository just because I'm too lazy or too busy to release it. You'll also get a (short, yes) comment in the change log, and as I tend to document everything I think that most users won't have to do more than to look at the updated documentation for the functions mentioned there.
5. Not having a public source code control system also effectively means that there'll be no real collaboration on these projects. This is fine for me as I don't believe in equal-right group development anyway. I tried it a couple of times and I was never happy with the outcome, probably because I'm too anal with how I think code and documentation should look like.
Of course, I happily accept patches and I do that a lot - look at the change logs of my projects.
6. At this point someone will inevitably come up with this shiny new source code control system foo-42 that solves all of the problems mentioned above. I tend to think that technology doesn't solve social problems, but apart from that: Can I easily use foo-42 with NT Emacs from Windows like I can use CVS now?
The short version of this is: Right now, I actively maintain more than 20 open source Lisp projects all of which I use for my commercial stuff. This is fun, but it's also a lot of work. I don't have enough energy and spare time for anything that would increase this amount of work even if it would make half a dozen fellow hackers happy.
Sorry if this sounds snide, it wasn't meant to... :)
Cheers, Edi.