The answer is "the software development life cycle"
Posted by admin, Tue May 23 04:41:17 UTC 2006
NewsForge | The CVS cop-out and the stranded user
One of my biggest pet peeves with open source software is what I call the CVS cop-out. It works like this: I criticize (accurately) some shortcoming of an open source application either in an article or in conversation, and someone responds with, “That’s not true! That feature was fixed in CVS four weeks ago!”
This complaint is real, but the answer is so fundamentally simple, that I have a hard time believing that people don’t do it. Every open source project needs a complete, end-to-end build process. And every check-in to the CVS repository needs to kick off an integrated/continuous build, which results in a usable, downloadable binary, or set of binaries. If you don’t have such a process in place, then you should put it on your task list as an absolute priority task.
I know that automating builds is hard and boring. Too bad. Call it a character-building exercise and Do It anyway. And make sure that every committer in your project understands that if they break the build, they have to drop everything and fix it. And if they don’t fix it, or if they keep breaking the build, then take away their committers’ rights. In the end, you will have better quality code being committed, AND the users of your software will be much, much happier. And isn’t that what open source is all about?
