On Jun 17, 2008, at 5:45 PM, KJK::Hyperion wrote:
I don't like the idea of developers being "granted" special status. We need a new development model, granted, but I don't like developers being singled out as guinea pigs, as a form of punishment even
Indeed, I don't see any privilege in a person who has a direct access over a person who sends over patches, or a person who works on some branch.
However, not to discourage Magnus, I remained silent about this, and proposed a better way to work: his commits are always going into the branch, where someone (including me) could review them fix spelling and code formatting, and apply to trunk if necessary.
Yes but you don't need to remove his trunk privileges for that. Surely Magnus is a decent human being who can be reasoned with, and who could agree to that on his own free will. To me, this sets a bad precedent and raises an issue of trust
Yes definately, however he kept breaking our agreements. The most recent one was his work in a win32kdx branch, which he nicely did for about a week, but then once again started pumping commits into trunk, with unreadable commit messages, every further commit reverted part of previous commit, along with a formatting change, making it even harder to see what was being changed at all. All of that was done in a deep night (~4am, european time).
I must admit Magnus always listened to my rants, and he did this time too, but it always happens AFTER the commit-revert spree is done to the trunk, and I always had to spend hours regress-testing his commits, and finding the bad change in a reformat/change code mess. And also he usually kept our agreement for a limited amount of time, like this time with a branch, which lasted roughly a week.
So my cup of tolerance got overflowed, and even though Magnus promised to approve all committed patches with me, I made a decision to enforce this process by setting ACLs for reactos repository.
It was not really an issue of trust, but it's an issue of simple common sense and obeying very-very simple rule: don't *play* in an official, working, fragile branch called "trunk". I tried to ensure this by verbal and written form for the last 2 years, but now it's time to ensure this more strictly, it's quite enough of diplomacy already.
You can blame me for this, but as a project coordinator I see this as a positive decision. I never wanted to make it public (and I didn't expect it will be SO cruicial to him, like if I banned him, or if I made him leave, or anything - I just proposed my own help, my own time), but since Magnus is so angry at me, allright, here we go with a drama. Maybe we come to a consensuss.
WBR, Aleksey.