FYI, from Perforce

From: David Abrahams (david.abrahams_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-22 15:05:02

David, we've gotta get the ability for my mail from Perforce to get to
you, or I'm gonna go batty! :-)

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To: "David Abrahams" <david.abrahams_at_[hidden]>,
"Craig McPheeters" <cmcpheeters_at_[hidden]>
Subject: slouching toward a Jam release
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 10:36:00 -0800
From: rmg_at_[hidden]

Hello David and Craig.

You are both distinguished by having made major jam changes.

As I've mentioned before, Christopher (mainly) and I did an initial
review of all of the unintegrated changes present in the
file://guest/.../jam/... branches in the Public Depot. We (basically)
triaged (well, "quintaged"?)them into:

ACCEPT 
Take the change for jam 2.4

REJECT 
Reject the change - i.e., Christopher didn't
agree that the change belongs in jam (or the
Jambase). This doesn't mean that the problem
the change aims at solveing is not real,
merely (I gather), that there are better ways
of solving it than a jam change.

REIMPLEMENT 
Christopher likes the idea of the change, but
upon looking at the contributed
implementation, thinks there's a "better"
way.

DONE 
The change had actually already (effectively)
made it into jam 2.3 one way or another.

TRIAGE 
Christopher wants to spend more time to
consider the change(s).

You are also both distinguished by the fact that your changes were
(exactly) the set of ones that remain in TRIAGE. (Should we call it
PURGATORY? LIMBO? Alas, I never had the catechism... :-))

But I did want to let you know, given that it's Jan 22, and I've been
promising progress for so long.

But, I _can_ claim the following progress:

Yesterday, I integrated the meager few ACCEPTS, and did a bunch of
changes aimed at cleaning up the integration history for the DONEs.

I've now told Christopher that I'm somewhat blocked (especially WRT
the TRIAGEs, and am hoping to get some time together with him in the
not-too-distant, in order to make progress there.

Next:

- One idea is to shift into test & release mode, and cut 2.4 from what's
in the mainline (more or less - I know that some people - Craig, I
think you're included - have pointed out some minor problems with it).

- Another is for me to take a wack at some of the man REIMPLEMENTs;

- Another is that I might spend time trying to codify the Zen of Jam,
so that contribibutors can work with better likelyhood of getting to
ACCEPT changes;

Finally, (if you'll indulge me in still more words)... I must say that
this whole process is interesting. It's my first taste of being in the
center of an open-source developement effort (well, with a team bigger
than just me!), and is flavored by Christopher's high degree of care
about jam, from several angles: For one, it's a key piece of
Perforce's infrastructure. For another, Christopher still cares deeply
about keeping it true to his ideas of Good Software, which run all the
way from the architectural level down to the lexical, and he's willing
to glow slow in order to get it right. I find it refreshing in a world
where I've often seen certain aspects of "quality" sacrified in the
name of "market window".

> Wouldn't we all? None of us really wants to be working on build
> systems, it seems ;-)

Yeah, I'd like to get my woodshop set up again some day :-).

Thanks, and keep on Jammin,

- rmg

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