[ODE] Patch for eliminating penetration bounce mega-force?

[J. Perkins]

On 5/31/05, Jon Watte (ODE) <hplus-ode at mindcontrol.org> wrote:
> I think, at the larger level, the problem is that there are three kinds
> of people on this list:

Perhaps part of the issue is that the people with commit priviledges
feel obligated to verify each patch, and they don't have time to do
it? (Pehaps I am wrong, in which case you can ignore everything that I
am about to say). I think that the community would be more than
willing to help; perhaps we need a better defined patching process?
Just to get the ball rolling, maybe something like:

1) submit a patch to this list

2) patch is peer reviewed. At least one (or 2 or 3) other people must
verify that it works as verified.

3) patch is checked into the unstable branch by the patch submitter
(or a proxy if the owner isn't comfortable with cvs).

4) the community tests against the unstable branch. This is the part
that makes the maintainers uncomfortable I imagine; the community has
to accept responsibility for getting this done.

5) after two weeks (or whatever) of testing and bug fixing, the
changes are merged into the main branch. If the patch fails
acceptance, then the branch is rolled back to the last tag.

Only one patch can be in-process at a time, but it would still be much
better than the situation we have now. The maintainers would only have
to ensure that the process is followed, instead of actually verifying
the patches themselves. The gist of it is that if patches need to be
tested before they can be accepted, then give us a definition of
"tested" that we can work toward.

I fall into the "hobbiest" category right now though I am working
nights-and-weekends toward a commercial product, of which ODE is a
small but important part. It is a great library and I would hate to
see the community abandon it; I would happy to build against unstable
if it improves the codebase. I don't like applying patches to my code
without some idea if it will ever make it into the main distribution.

Hope this helps someone,

Jason