Re: [boost] [Guild] Getting volunteers' changes back to trunk

Subject: Re: [boost] [Guild] Getting volunteers' changes back to trunk
From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-11-14 15:35:35

Rene Rivera wrote:
> On 11/12/2010 9:33 PM, David Abrahams wrote:
>> At Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:33:38 -0800,
>> Robert Ramey wrote:
>>>
>>>> I don't think the volunteers themselves can be authorized to
>>>> commit to trunk.  We need more trusted people to do that.
>>>
>>> I would like to clarify this.  It's not a question of trust, it's
>>> more a question realizing that there has to be one person who is
>>> responsable for the integrity of the whole library.  In a larger
>>> library, many patches and fixes will inadvertantly break something
>>> else.  If you want someone to be responsable, he has has to have the
>>> authority to control all the changes.  If changes go in from more
>>> than one person - then no one is responsable.
>>
>> I think I understand what you're driving at, but if what you said
>> were strictly true, there would be no working partnerships in the
>> world, right?  There is such a thing as shared responsibility. However, 
>> it's true that you probably can't spread it uniformly
>> across the community.

It's sort of off topic, but in anycase ...

The concept of "partnership" be it in business,  politics or whatever
generally fails for the reasons I've alluded to above.  Those that
do work (e.g. hewlet-packard, rogers and hamerstein, abott
& costello, jobs & wozniak, etc.) may be partnerships in some
nominal way, but in fact they are not based on shared responsability
but rather divided/allocated responsability.  So a look at the
above examples yields respectively technical/business, lyrics/music,
straightman/funnyman, technical/marketing, etc.

If I had nothing else to do, I could go on on how that relates
to boost, but I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.

Robert Ramey