[ODE] Proposal: ODE "unstable"

[Russ Smith]

hi,

let me try and address some of these concerns. ODE is a slowly moving
project right now, as all of the developers have a (i guess) lot of other
things in their lives besides ODE :) - however, there's a few things that
can be done to get patches into CVS faster. here's what i've done:

  * created an UNSTABLE branch on CVS. this is where untested, potentially
    dodgy code should go. the UNSTABLE branch (or parts of it) can be
    merged to the more stable trunk periodically, after a sufficient
    period of testing. obvious bug fixes can continue to go on the trunk.

  * i you want to check in your patch, but think that the project
    developers are being too slow, ask to get 'developer' status on
    sourceforge (make sure to include your sourceforge user id in your
    request). as a developer, you can check in your change yourself!
    yes, this is more work for you, but it's less work for the project
    admins (you might think it takes just ten seconds to check in a
    patch, but that true only if you are checking in 100 at a time).

  * when you check in your patch, remember to post a message to this list
    saying what you've done and why.

  * what about the security and code-stability issues of having too many
    people with CVS access? well, i'm not too worried about malicious
    people who try to trash the project - (1) the ODE community by and
    large has been extremely well behaved compared with other open source
    projects (pat yourselves on the back), (2) there's a CVS mailing list
    that publishes new patches so there's plenty of visibility, and (3)
    CVS never forgets, so it's easy enough to recover from any problems.
    if this free-for-all turns out to be a problem (and i don't think it
    will), we can always try something else.

  * i've upgraded four developers to admin status (adam moss, jeffrey
    smith, martin martin and nate waddoups). all project admins can
    add new developers. so if you want to have developer status to check
    in your patch, there should be *somebody* who can help you.

on the issue of subversion, ODE won't be using it anytime soon. i agree
that it's better than CVS, but CVS is what sourceforge provides right now,
so changing over would be more trouble than it's worth.

russ.

--
Russ Smith
http://www.q12.org/

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, Tanguy Fautre wrote:

>
> I totally agree,
>
> I've posted two patches last month, one to get ODE to compile on QNX and
> another to get OPCODE working on AMD64, and none of them ever made it to
> the repository.
>
> I've been using Subversion for a year now, I never had any problem with
> it. So I'm all for it.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Tanguy
>
>
> Colin Bonstead wrote:
> > It seems like there hasn't been much progress on ODE lately, despite the
> > fact that there are lots of people using it and willing to submit
> > patches.  Part of this seems to be because the maintainers don't want to
> > apply any patches that aren't fully implemented, or have some bugs.
> > Instead they go into the contrib folder, or don't ever get added.  The
> > problem is, very few people are going to bother applying the patches
> > from the contrib folder, so the bugs or missing features are never going
> > to get taken care of.
> >
> > What I'm proposing is having an "unstable" tree too, which has all the
> > contributions in it.  People can build that tree, fix bugs, and things
> > can eventually get promoted to the main tree.
> >
> > I personally submitted a patch for trimesh preprocessing way back in
> > June of last year.  Here's the mail:
> >
> > http://q12.org/pipermail/ode/2004-June/013183.html
> >
> > Nothing ever happened with it, probably since I only added support for
> > it to the ccylinder collider (although any collider that doesn't have
> > support should just behave as it always has).  I can confirm this
> > optimization does work since we're using it in Myst V.
> >
> > While I'm throwing things out here, I might as well also suggest that
> > ODE switch to Subversion instead of CVS.  We've been using Subversion
> > here at Cyan for almost a year with no problems, and it's WAAAY better
> > than CVS.
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > ODE mailing list
> > ODE at q12.org
> > http://q12.org/mailman/listinfo/ode
> >
>
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