[ros-dev] when will I return Magnus Olsen aka GreatLord

[Aleksey Bragin]

On Jun 17, 2008, at 5:45 PM, KJK::Hyperion wrote:
> I don't like the idea of developers being "granted" special status. We
> need a new development model, granted, but I don't like developers  
> being
> singled out as guinea pigs, as a form of punishment even

Indeed, I don't see any privilege in a person who has a direct access  
over a person who sends over patches, or a person who works on some  
branch.

>> However, not to discourage Magnus, I remained silent about this, and
>> proposed a better way to work: his commits are always going into the
>> branch, where someone (including me) could review them fix  
>> spelling and
>> code formatting, and apply to trunk if necessary.
>
> Yes but you don't need to remove his trunk privileges for that. Surely
> Magnus is a decent human being who can be reasoned with, and who could
> agree to that on his own free will. To me, this sets a bad  
> precedent and
> raises an issue of trust

Yes definately, however he kept breaking our agreements. The most  
recent one was his work in a win32kdx branch, which he nicely did for  
about a week, but then once again started pumping commits into trunk,  
with unreadable commit messages, every further commit reverted part  
of previous commit, along with a formatting change, making it even  
harder to see what was being changed at all.
All of that was done in a deep night (~4am, european time).

I must admit Magnus always listened to my rants, and he did this time  
too, but it always happens AFTER the commit-revert spree is done to  
the trunk, and I always had to spend hours regress-testing his  
commits, and finding the bad change in a reformat/change code mess.  
And also he usually kept our agreement for a limited amount of time,  
like this time with a branch, which lasted roughly a week.

So my cup of tolerance got overflowed, and even though Magnus  
promised to approve all committed patches with me, I made a decision  
to enforce this process by setting ACLs for reactos repository.

It was not really an issue of trust, but it's an issue of simple  
common sense and obeying very-very simple rule: don't *play* in an  
official, working, fragile branch called "trunk". I tried to ensure  
this by verbal and written form for the last 2 years, but now it's  
time to ensure this more strictly, it's quite enough of diplomacy  
already.

You can blame me for this, but as a project coordinator I see this as  
a positive decision. I never wanted to make it public (and I didn't  
expect it will be SO cruicial to him, like if I banned him, or if I  
made him leave, or anything - I just proposed my own help, my own  
time), but since Magnus is so angry at me, allright, here we go with  
a drama. Maybe we come to a consensuss.


WBR,
Aleksey.