[plt-dev] Re: Generated files and co-existing copies of DrScheme

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 10:19 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> On Nov 30, Sam TH wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 9:17 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > I missed this, and I already undid it. [...]
>>
>> [...] Once something is discussed and decided upon, one person
>> shouldn't just unilaterally undo it.  [...]
>
> Yes, this was discussed, one decision was (a) it should be added with
> a flag, and another "decision" (for lack of any objections) was to not
> make it re-use the environment variable on each use of
> `find-system-path'.  Due to these decisions, I assumed that Carl would
> do the necessary work before committing on the trunk -- and when I saw
> a commit that didn't include that, it was easier for me to revert and
> re-do.

The problem here is that we have no policy about who makes decisions
about the trunk.  I find this process very frustrating -- I put lots
of effort into making sure what I committed was acceptable and
addressed all necessary issues, so that my commit would not be wasted.
 Despite all my effort (a long thread on plt-dev, consulting Matthias,
consulting Matthew, multiple rounds of merging changes from the trunk,
rebuilding, and testing), it wasn't good enough.  The code needed to
be taken out immediately for a rewrite some time later.

I'm sure Eli finds it frustrating, too -- he contributed a lot to that
thread on plt-dev, only to see a commit that didn't live up to what he
thought had been decided about the feature.  I doubt he wanted to
spend his Monday night rewriting my code, and I appreciate his efforts
to do so.

What is our policy on committing code to the trunk?  How do I know
when something is good enough?  Who decides?  I have no idea, and it
makes me very reluctant to put my time into anything else that goes
into the trunk if I have no way of predicting that it might be kept or
not.

(I recognize that, in this case, the feature was kept.  However, if
the details had been only slightly different, it might not have been.
Furthermore, since Eli had to take out my code and rewrite it, none of
my code itself was kept, and the effort I made to write and test it
did not pay off.)

--Carl