[Koha-devel] A Discussion on A Policy Setting Forth Standards of Code Submission, etc. [WAS: RFCs for 3.4 from BibLibre (serials & acquisitions)]

[Chris Cormack]

On 3 November 2010 10:27, Paul Poulain <paul.poulain at biblibre.com> wrote:

> We haven't started working on any of those RFCs (except solR, to have a
> proof of concept).
> What has really be a problem for us is that we published RFCs for Lyon3
> university a long time ago (mail from Nicolas on koha-devel oct, 12,
> 2009), there has been strictly no reaction/feedback to those RFCs.
> Now they are done, and we have rebased them vs head (huge work, and huge
> QA to do, and probably a lot of time lost)
> Could they be rejected by the community ? hopefully I hope no, but I
> frankly don't know what we (BibLibre) could do if it were :-((( (because
> the customers are live now !)
> I think we (all) failed because Koha 3.2 was 9 months late. Well, in
> fact, I think the mistake was not to branch 3.4 immediatly on feature
> freeze. That would have been much less pain for us (that are
> customer-planning driven) (suggestion below).

What would have caused much much much less pain for you, was to
develop your features in small branches, rather than one monolithic
branch which makes rebasing much harder than it needs to be.

This is a lesson that cannot be overstated, topic/bug/feature branches
make everyones lives much easier. And they mean that if one feature is
rejected ... then the whole stack doesn't need to be.

I don't think branching sooner or an earlier release would have helped
anywhere near as much as developing in smaller branches, not one huge
one.

Chris