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

Subject: Re: [boost] [Guild] Getting volunteers' changes back to trunk
From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-11-14 17:22:07

At Sun, 14 Nov 2010 12:35:35 -0800,
Robert Ramey wrote:
> 
> 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.

This isn't as black-and-white as you make it sound.  You can think of
your examples as role allocation by strength.  It doesn't mean there's
no such thing as shared responsibility.

On a successful sports team, if a player is sidelined for any reason,
the rest of the team takes responsibility for covering his/her
duties.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com