[hunchentoot-devel] New release 0.5.1

[Edi Weitz]

Hi Cyrus,

On Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:14:34 -0800, Cyrus Harmon <ch-tbnl at bobobeach.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the new releases. I hate to be a pest about this, and I
> think this was covered before, but I can't remember the answer. Is
> there any way we could convince you to host hunchentoot's source in
> a publicly accessible source code control system? I'd love to be
> able to just do a diff against the repository to see what has
> changed.

Don't remember if this has been covered before, but I'll try to give
an elaborate answer this time so I can refer to it later... :)

1. I use CVS mostly as a convenient backup mechanism for myself, so I
   can revert to previous versions if I broke something or restore
   code that I accidentally dismissed.  I don't write clever change
   comments (in fact, I usually don't write any except something like
   "..." to appease Emacs), so the CVS history looks pretty boring.  I
   do tag releases, but that's about it.

2. I have everything on my laptop which I regularly also use to work
   in coffee bars or trains where I don't have Internet access.  Every
   source control system that will be publicly accessible won't be
   accessible to /me/ in these situations.

3. I wouldn't want to set up /any/ source control system on one of my
   own servers, because I wouldn't want to cope with more potential
   security risks.  Yes, I could use common-lisp.net, but although
   they're doing a great job their uptime in the last year hasn't been
   outstanding.

4. I believe in the "release often" mantra, i.e. as soon as there's a
   new feature or a bugfix it is given a release number and pushed out
   of the door - you're not missing out on stuff that's lying around
   in my local repository just because I'm too lazy or too busy to
   release it.  You'll also get a (short, yes) comment in the change
   log, and as I tend to document everything I think that most users
   won't have to do more than to look at the updated documentation for
   the functions mentioned there.

5. Not having a public source code control system also effectively
   means that there'll be no real collaboration on these projects.
   This is fine for me as I don't believe in equal-right group
   development anyway.  I tried it a couple of times and I was never
   happy with the outcome, probably because I'm too anal with how I
   think code and documentation should look like.

   Of course, I happily accept patches and I do that a lot - look at
   the change logs of my projects.

6. At this point someone will inevitably come up with this shiny new
   source code control system foo-42 that solves all of the problems
   mentioned above.  I tend to think that technology doesn't solve
   social problems, but apart from that: Can I easily use foo-42 with
   NT Emacs from Windows like I can use CVS now?

The short version of this is: Right now, I actively maintain more than
20 open source Lisp projects all of which I use for my commercial
stuff.  This is fun, but it's also a lot of work.  I don't have enough
energy and spare time for anything that would increase this amount of
work even if it would make half a dozen fellow hackers happy.

Sorry if this sounds snide, it wasn't meant to... :)

Cheers,
Edi.