Release early, release often

Petter Reinholdtsen (pere@hungry.com)
Sun, 18 Jul 1999 14:11:23 +0200

I'm one of the strange programmers who beleave in the slogan "Release
early, release often". I find the release rate of SANE too late and
too slow.

To get the "current" version of SANE, I have to fetch the latest
release and patches from all over the world to get the latest backends
and frontends. I beleave this is a problem easily solved using
version control software and by giving more then one person write
access to the master source. With a public read-only source tree, us
wanting to do development on SANE don't have to wait 3-6 months to see
if our patches made into the distribution.

To solve this problem I sat up a CVS tree at cvs.hungry.com with
public read-only access from anoncvs.hungry.com, and gave the current
maintainer David write access to the server. Before the backend
maintainers get write access, David have to say OK.

The CVS tree is hardly used at all. I beleave the reason for this is
that David is unfamiliar with CVS, and also want to keep the master
source under his control, and not on some random source code
repository set up by a complete stranger. I hope I'm mistaken.

If this situation don't change, I've been thinking about using the CVS
server for SANE development myself, collecting all reasonable patches
and commiting them into my own branch, releasing snapshots every week
(or more often), like Alan Cox is releasing his experimental version
of Linux. I do not want to do this, as it will generate a code fork,
and unless most or all SANE developers colaborates, the CVS version
would be only for my benifit.

Am I wasting my time?

Among the things I would like to fix with SANE are Win32 support,
better network support (access control and encrypted communication)
and improving SnapScan and Coolscan backends. Until the development
model changes, it seems a waste to start working on these.

-- 
##>  Petter Reinholdtsen  <##  |  pere@td.org.uit.no



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