Re: [boost] As a side note about source control

Subject: Re: [boost] As a side note about source control
From: Ulrich Eckhardt (doomster_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-09-09 11:54:48

On Wednesday 01 September 2010 06:52:49 Eric Hopper wrote:
> Now I want to make something that's a library module.  I morph my
> special case into a more general case as a proof of concept.  When that
> works, I then consider how to integrate the library module into Boost
> because that's where it belongs.

How about a branch? I don't know if you already have access to the SVN repo, 
but if you have you just create a branch folder, copy some stable version 
there as a base for hacking on it and modify it at will. This not only allows 
anyone interested to follow, it also makes it much easier to merge the changes 
one by one (if they are separate) back into trunk.

> I do not want to have to interact especially with the community for a
> one off change to a project I'm not really interested in becoming a
> regular contributor to.  A centralized source system makes it hard to
> make changes except on active branches which frequently contain changes
> I'm not interested in testing.  It makes it hard to track my changes
> locally regardless of the decisions of the community running the
> project.  And it makes it hard to contribute a change back to the
> community when I don't want to become a full member, which in turn
> raises a barrier to entry to me being inexorably sucked into a community
> I didn't think I was going to participate in.

In my experience, this was a non-issue with the Boost maintainers.

Otherwise, I agree that distributed VCs make things easier. OTOH, while I can 
pull some sources including history from an upstream repository, making things 
visible for review and merging back upstream is more complicated than if I had 
made a feature branch in upstream's repository.

Cheers!

Uli