Re: Public Access to Perforce?

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 09:22:36 -0400 (EDT), Robert Watson
<rwatson_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, David Rhodus wrote:
> 
> > With the perforce trees being hidden away without public access to the
> > changes, this makes the FreeBSD project no longer an open source
> > project.
> 
> That comment seems to be in stark contrast to reality.  One of the most
> important goals in using Perforce to supplement CVS has been to get
> developers to stop keeping weeks or months of "in progress" changes solely
> on their notebook or workstation, and to increase collaboration
> opportunities among developers.  Previously, developers would maintain

Right, but there are many more developers outside of the people with
access to the perforce server.

> As already pointed out, most if not all of the interesting "in progress"
> work in Perforce is regularly and mechanically exported as patch sets or
> via cvsup by the developers, something they can now do much more easily
> now than they could before.  Most of the major group work going on in
> Perforce is exported via cvsup10 (TrustedBSD, etc).  In addition, many

The trustedbsd trees are the only thing exported there, well for other
than some mostly dead trees.  None of the TLS, AMD64, NETSMP, and who
knows what else since its not redly a public forum.

> 
> I think you'd have to work fairly hard to find open source projects that
> have no ouststanding local patch sets of as-yet uncommitted and

So with perforce development software, fbsd will become extra stable
hence removing the need for the -current tree ?

> experimental changes; by providing a central infrastructure to manage
> this, we're helping developers to avoid loss and collaborate better/more.
> Local and experimental changes are a necessary part of the development
> process for any reasonably large project, as the software mainline
> requires greater stability than the stability of every work in progress.

But all of these is why we have had the -stable and -current trees.
Yes, its not the best method but at least its an method which provides
open access to the development work that is ongoing.

> 
> The unavailability of the perforce.freebsd.org web site is due to bugs in
> the older version of the Perforce web server, and that the software has

The perforce.freebsd.org web site is a marsh pit to navigate. I think
more people would be content If the site could be cleaned up and the
method of offering a .tar.gz file of every tree on the hour for
download via the website was added.


-- 
                                            -David
                                            Steven David Rhodus
                                            <drhodus_at_machdep.com>