From kde-core-devel Tue May 01 18:55:33 2001 From: Martijn Klingens Date: Tue, 01 May 2001 18:55:33 +0000 To: kde-core-devel Subject: Re: Possible cause of kivio problems X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=98874325529999 It's easy for me to talk about things like this because I'm not involved with KOffice in any way but an occasional checkout and build (and maybe a bug report). This is also why I initially decided not to respond to this thread. But right now I feel like expressing my feelings nevertheless. I hope I don't upset people more than they already are, the following is just my opinion on the whole matter. I would like to start asking people to calm down. Things went wrong with Kivio, there is nobody who can argue that. What went wrong and where it went wrong is hard to say. I know from past experience at some school projects how annoying and frustrating it is when code is moved or changed without you knowing it. And when things break without you knowing why, your initial reaction is anger. Not that anger is any good, on the contrary rather. But anger _is_ a natural response. I assume we all know that it's hard to talk with someone who is angry. The most likely result is probably that people start saying things they'll regret later. And often people are too 'proud' to admit being wrong, so they will defend a proposition made when they were angry even if they _know_ they are wrong. People who know me personally know that I myself have this particular behaviour and I'm quite sure I'm not the only one. I rather suspect something like this going on in this thread. If you ask me, I'd say all people involved with KOffice/Kivio are partly wrong and made mistakes. That's life - shit happens. And it always seems to happen at the worst possible occasion (like packaging Kivio 1.0 stable). The only thing we can hope is that people will learn from these experiences and do better in the future. Continuing this discussion will only separate theKompany and KDE more and more - and nobody will benefit that. KDE should be very thankful to theKompany for all the great apps and widgets they have thanks to Shawn's policy of open sourcing parts of his products. Likewise, theKompany should also be thankful to KDE for the great platform it is to build for and for all the help they get from KDE. If theKompany would be developing for Windows it would be much harder to change the core libraries to support your Brand New Feature (tm) that can't be implemented without that library change. This is part of the power of open source, especially for base libraries. As said before, the main problem was communication here, in every possible way. The Kivio developers should be subscribed to koffice-devel so they know what's going on for KOffice in general. Although they are writing and maintaining only a single app, that app is getting part of a big integrated whole. And I personally think that the same look and feel, the same widgets and all those kinds of consistency benefit all of us. They make KOffice so much better and are thus a great benefit to KDE and even Unix on the desktop. Pulling Kivio out of KOffice is not going to benefit KDE, nor will it necessarily benefit theKompany. Sure, it will give the Kivio developers less external worries like somebody moving widgets to another location in the repository. It also makes sure that everything is done according the (e.g. communication-) rules within your company, something that cannot be enforced in a worldwide CVS repository. I think the KOffice developers should have announced the move beforehand (or ultimately right after committing it) if they didn't already do that. The fact that the Kivio developers on their part aren't subscribed to koffice-devel makes the problem bigger. And also changing makefiles and moving icons adds to the frustration. Every single action would, in itself, be an improvement. Even Shawn will probably admit that. But the timing was chosen particularly bad. Nobody would expect that they were still packaging Kivio 1.0 when others were already committing code to CVS. The fact that Shawn seems to have understood that the Koffice beta also meant 'feature freeze' made problems worse. Shawn didn't expect such major changes, the KOffice team didn't expect somebody to rely on the CVS tree. And three (or maybe even more) mostly unrelated changes to Kivio that all independently caused breakage if you weren't aware of them certainly explains Shawn's initial call for ACLs. But putting ACLs in Kivio is not a big benefit either. It does make sure that nobody with the proper rights can modify your code. But that includes the bug fixes that free-time developers like me might want to make. I might send the patch to the list instead, but I might also skip Kivio and start hacking another app. Being able to commit right away when you know something is working for you is part of the fun IMO. With such a policy you will surely encounter a moment that somebody like me has committed code that breaks elsewhere. But you will also encounter a moment that someone fixes bugs in your code or adds a new feature to it. It is easier to add features if you can maintain the code (and thus fix the bugs that might have been lurking in it) by committing to CVS directly. Sending each and every patch to the maintainer is nice for small patches, but will get annoying soon. I for one would not write any patch beyond the 'trivial' level if I would have to contact someone else to actually apply each and every follow-up. I would personally use ACLs for all of KDE CVS in the period around beta and/or final releases. And the app's maintainer should be able to set and remove the ACLs. This way Shawn could have put a one-week ACL (or whatever he needed) on Kivio while he was assembling Kivio 1.0. After that he should then remove the ACL so he would benefit from the entire open source community and the improved KOffice integration David and Werner are trying to achieve. This particular use of ACLs is IMO an improvement - just putting an ACL on the code 'ad infinitum' IMO is not. As a conclusion I would like to ask everyone who is involved with this again to stop the discussion and start doing what you are all so good at - creating all those wonderful KDE apps. We _did_ have a problem and we _were_ wrong, but we _all_ were. Just let us learn our lesson and start hacking again... Please! Regards, Martijn