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List:       struts-user
Subject:    Re: [FRIDAY] Re: has struts reached the saturation
From:       Dave Newton <newton () pingsite ! com>
Date:       2006-03-24 21:04:58
Message-ID: 44245EFA.8090205 () pingsite ! com
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Jonathan Revusky wrote:
> I just visited the above link and read the article and I don't see how
> this can be presented as evidence against a more open collaborative
> model. Basically it's the story of a bug. Somebody made a mistake.
> People will make mistakes regardless. 

Yep.

Guess what, though: inexperienced coders make more.

> Also, the bug occurred, as far as I can see, in a closed source
> commercial codebase, so it's not clear to me how this is relevant at all.

Yeah, because closed-source commercial codebases are completely
different from open-source codebases...

Er...

> I have said repeatedly at this point that I assume that code committed
> by newbie committers would be reviewed. In principle, a bug like the
> one described in that article would be caught at that point. 

I know _I_ don't have the time to review each and every patch that comes
in to a repo. Heck, I barely have had time to deal with the commits from
the relatively smaller number of developers I've dealt with on previous
projects. That's one of the bugaboos with some open-source projects:
they started, as they say, as a scratch, then got released. This means
that not every project will have enough knowledgeable people available
enough of the time to keep up with code quality issues.

Of course it's not impossible, but it can be difficult sometimes.

> But another point about this is that having more people in the code
> could decrease the mean life expectancy of such bugs because of the
> phenomenon of more eyeballs.

We agree on this, although it's definitely not a guarantee.

Automated testing helps a lot, especially if ppl. run the tests on their
own repos _before_ committing but I haven't found that this is always
the case. It's gotten better over the years as testing tools have
improved and build processes have become more automated and/or
integrated into whichever dev environment they're using.

I'm still not going to give commit access to anybody that asks for it
because _I_ haven't found that it works well. If you have, that's great,
and I'm glad it's working for you, and I hope it continues to.

Dave



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