[Phpwiki-talk] Re: Wiki spam and the future of phpwiki

[Matthew P. <mp...@he...>]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 06:27:24PM +0200, Arnaud Fontaine wrote:
> "Release early, release often" .. That's one of the main bazaar rules.
> It's really important for the developpement to go nicely.

It's not quite as easy as that, from experience.  Throwing releases out
there willy-nilly tends to piss people off, and if people are ticked off
they're not about to run out and install whatever you put out next time,
which kinda screws your tester base.  However, running from CVS isn't
something anyone should contemplate, really -- you don't know what
ickyness is running around in there, and supporting people running CVS
snapshots is hell -- how do you realistically answer the question "so
which version did you encounter the bug in?".  A date range is less than
pleasant to deal with.

> I think we must find a different dev/commit model to attract more
> developpers and ... keep us working on phpwiki ... Should we have
> several cvs/svn trees and decide on a process to merge them every ...
> week ? Or have several cvs branches ? Should Reini or Steve give write
> access to any/more contributors ?

You're crying out for a distributed development model.  GNU Arch
(unpleasant UI notwithstanding) can provide all of the features you're
after.  Basically, one (or more!) people maintains a blessed "releases"
branch, which merges bits and pieces from other contributors as they
write and test them.  Other people can cherry-pick changes from people
as they like.  It's an incredibly powerful model for development;
unfortunately, it has the downside of tending to melt peoples' brains a
bit at first, especially if they've been suckling from the CVS teat for
too long (I speak from experience; my brain got melted).

I've got experience deploying Arch in an OSS project similar to PHPWiki
(IRM; http://www.sf.net/projects/irm), and while it hasn't been as
straightforward as I would have liked, I think it's been a success, and
if the PHPWiki developers (and the rest of the PHPWiki community) are
keen, I'd be willing to sit down and help PHPWiki transition to using
GNU Arch for revision control.

- Matt