Quality control and FOSS rant

[Andy Tripp]

>
>
> Comments and criticisms welcome.
>   
I suppose this is more of a troll than a criticism, sorry about that.

> Classpath bugs don't
> have such administration issues due to
> its longer history as a FOSS project and existing community-oriented fun
> development paradigm.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Classpath lacks the basic 
quality controls that OpenJDK has?
Such as the requirement that all changes be peer-reviewed and signed off 
by at least two other developers with knowledge about
the changed code, and extensive regression testing before incorporating 
into a release.

You may consider these as just annoying "administration issues", but 
others consider it basic quality control, as essential
as being sure that the code compiles.

And while I'm sure it makes for "fun development", I'm not so sure that 
it's good for ensuring quality.

You might want to consider having Classpath follow some basic quality 
measures. It will make the work
less fun, but it's also fun to end up with a good quality product. And 
if people only work on the "fun" stuff,
the product might never actually finish.

I realize you weren't trying to put down Sun and its process, and I'm 
being overly defensive. It's just that
I don't see how FOSS developers can continually just brush off the 
issue. It takes months to get a fix
into Java, and only minutes to get a fix into Classpath. The goal of 
Java is to be a complete, stable,
quality release. If Classpath's goal is just to provide a fun playground 
for developers, that's one thing. But if Classpath's
goals are the same as Java's goals, then someone's process is wrong. 
Either those
quality controls are needed or they're not. It wouldn't be a big deal if 
the common thinking was that FOSS projects
like Classpath are just toys for developer enjoyment, but I frequently 
see claims that FOSS applications are
on par with the quality in closed source, or even better quality.

Also, as FOSS developers start to contribute
to OpenJDK, I'm already seeing suggestions for changes where the 
rationale seems to be "because that's
how FOSS projects do things", with of course the underlying assumption 
that that makes it a reasonable approach.

Again, sorry for the rant/troll.

Andy