Re: Please hold off modifying sc in the next few weeks

Hi Bjoern,

On Fri, 2013-06-14 at 10:37 -0400, Kohei Yoshida wrote:
> On 06/14/2013 10:11 AM, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> > Im not too happy with essentially shutting down all development
> > on master on one application for an undefined timeframe. Can we
> > make this a bit more bearable by:
>
> I'm not shutting down all development. If you know what you are doing 

        I think this is the key :-) "If you know what you're doing" ;-) Kohei's
work is a vast, critical, atomic change that he is working really hard
on. The design has been discussed in detail between the core guys that
hack on and care about calc - so no-one that works on this is left in
the dark.

        I'm personally really impressed with the work Kohei is doing there;
he's done a fantastic job of doing the changes incrementally on master
to isolate the horrendous structural badness in calc into a single place
(the column implementation). Now there is a big, atomic push to churning
through the re-write of column, and now he is making really great
progress I think.

        To me his request is completely reasonable - and it helps both new
contributors and Kohei. If people are tweaking / doing cosmetic
changes / comment translation etc. in calc for (only the next couple of
weeks) - it is likely that their work will be wasted since the end
result is going to be very significantly different. It will have unit
tests, be squeaky clean, have much better performance etc. :-) [ well
that's the plan anyhow ].

        So - I agree, that in the abstract there is a general taking a mutex on
big chunks of code. There is a risk of discouraging development and
making people scared of change: that is clearly so. However, in this
specific instance - IMHO the benefit hugely outweighs the risk.

> Whether it's a "good thing" or not, I'm simply requesting some 
> assistance to make my life a bit easier

        IMHO this request helps everyone, it's time limited for a few weeks, no
doubt Kohei will send another / victory mail when it's done & landed :-)
and we can all carry on hacking on calc ;-)

        Anyhow - hopefully we've done this to death by now. I for one, am
really looking forward to seeing the result of Kohei's work - and am
itching to help him out (modulo suspecting that my 'help' might be more
of a hinderance ;-).

        ATB,

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot