Re: [Self-platform-dev] Fwd: [bug #22392] Unselectable items in the version tree

[Federico Heinz]

On 23/03/2008, Dinesh Joshi wrote:
> Hmm..taking a more balanced view, its a personal choice. But since we
> are talking about a collaborative environment, it seems to be wasteful
> if I redo some work that someone else has already completed or is in
> the process of completing. It is much wiser to "help" each other
> rather than be oblivious to what other people are working on or have
> already worked on and this also includes unpublished work ( work in
> progress ).

Agreed. But just knowing that someone has touched a version, but without any
indication of the nature of the change doesn't help, and can even be
discouraging ("let's wait until this guy is finished before I contribute to
it"). And while duplication of effort can be wasteful, it isn't necessary so. I
do think it's good we have both Gnome and KDE.

> In the real world we  do see a lot of "unfinished", "unpublished"
> work. Drafts? Alpha / Beta versions of softwares? RFCs? Anyone?

Well, yes: free software publishes its intermediate stages, and so does
Wikipedia, both models we are trying to adpat to the LO world, and to improve
on them.

> Going by what Federico said on savannah is somewhat against the notion
> of a collaborative environment.

On the contrary: keeping private changes private encourages authors to publish
early and often, and that is the true mark of collaboration.

> An excellent example of resources going waste in a collaborative
> environment is the example of Beryl and Compiz. Finally, they decided
> to pool their resources and now they're far ahead of where they were.

That's a merge. We should encourage that, and it's precisely what the idea of
publishing early and often does.

        Fede

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