[csw-maintainers] questions about GAR, history, and naming

[Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 8:48 AM, Dagobert Michelsen <dam at opencsw.org> wrote:
> The decision logic is already quite complex and inserting these switches
> would even increase it, making it unreadable for new GAR maintainers.
> And what for? If there are people from linux bbc or Garnome who want to
> work in a unified development tree I would certainly help in making it.
> If you really think the project needs this I won't stop you from doing
> work in that area ;-) Just to give you in impression: This separation
> would mean a complete restructuring of GAR which will take at least a
> week for me to do it. A week I would like to spend better on updating
> the farm and deploying automated builds.

Is "to do things cleanly" the only reason, or are there more reasons?
I think everyone would agree that, all other things equal, clean is
better, nicer, and in the long term also useful. But there's also the
cost. If software developer has time on their hands, they can spend
time just polishing the code, making it more readable, structured,
layered, functional, unit-tested, or whatever property they want it to
have. However, in our case we're after very specific needs in GAR
development: parallel builds and modulations. There are also other
things that currently need attention. I'd like us to make development
decisions based on current needs rather than aesthetics. The
restructuring of GAR can be filed in an issue tracking system so the
idea doesn't get lost or forgotten.

Maciej