Org-mode development (was: Vacation, and 5.04)

[Carsten Dominik <dominik@science.uva.nl>]

On Jul 20, 2007, at 17:28, Adam Spiers wrote:

> This might be a pertinent moment to bring up the topic of revision
> control ... or actually it might be a particularly bad moment,
> considering that the maintainer is about to vanish for 3 weeks!  But I
> wanted to propose the idea of adopting a distributed revision control
> system.  This would allow any individual coder to (amongst other
> benefits) easily create short-term feature branches or bugfix branches
> off Carsten's releases, share them publically with others for testing,
> and enable very low-cost merging back into the mainstream.  To use the
> current situation as one example, this would mean that Carsten can
> relax happily on the beach (or wherever he is ;-) knowing that his
> absence is guaranteed *not* to hold any progress back, even if he
> decided to stay there for several months ;-)

Now we are talking..... :-)

> In case anyone's unfamiliar with the benefits of distributed revision
> control (vs. centralized, e.g. CVS/svn), enjoy this great talk by
> Linus Torvalds at google:
>
>   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
>
> It claims to be about git, but actually it's more about distributed
> revision control systems in general - everything he says applies to
> similar systems such as mercurial.

Thanks for this enjoyable link - lots of fun to watch Linus like this.

I'd like to make some comments about the development model or Org-mode
and put it up here for discussion.

- Org-mode is part of Emacs - this means that I can only accept patches
   from people who have signed the appropriate papers with the FSF.  You
   might have noticed in the past that I usually don't simply apply a
   patch.  I change it considerably or re-implement the feature, to make
   sure that we will not run into copyright issues.  If you want to
   contribute to org-mode and make life easy for me, write to
   assign@gnu.org and ask for the paperwork to become a contributor to
   org-mode in Emacs, and let me know what you have done so so that I
   can start to use your patches directly.

- The second reason why I often don't apply patches exactly as submitted
   is because I see my role in filtering and shaping features so that
   they fit exactly into the feel and look of Org-mode as I see it.
   I don't want it to loose focus.
   You might see this as a good thing, but you could also see this
   as slowing down development.

- I have never used git or a similar distributed tool - so I would
   have to learn how to use them.

Thanks for your comments.

- Carsten