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Date:      Fri, 31 Jan 2003 21:12:25 -0800
From:      David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>
To:        Wesley Morgan <morganw@chemikals.org>
Cc:        Mike Barcroft <mike@FreeBSD.ORG>, Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: State of the Union Report (backout request department)
Message-ID:  <20030201051225.GB18101@HAL9000.homeunix.com>
In-Reply-To: <20030131223004.B19785@volatile.chemikals.org>
References:  <200301311926.12431.linimon@lonesome.com> <20030131214318.E69408@espresso.q9media.com> <20030131223004.B19785@volatile.chemikals.org>

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Thus spake Wesley Morgan <morganw@chemikals.org>:
> On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Mike Barcroft wrote:
> 
> > The archives might not be telling the whole story.  A lot of times
> > these things get handled behind closed doors, whether private e-mail
> > or developer-only lists.  Thankfully though, most conflicts *do* get
> > resolved. :)
> 
> I have always LOVED watching the commits and backouts. I find it much more
> exciting to watch the actual development commit by commit, watch the
> brainiacs audit each other, and resolve to the best course. It seems much
> better than the way Linux traditionally did it (although they seem to have
> moved to bitkeeper) and much more like a professional development team.

The problem is that once something is in the tree and someone asks
for a backout, there is a stigma attached to it.  It's as though
the original committer would be admitting that he's wrong by
backing it out, even if his commit is justified.  So he gets
defensive about it (and sometimes everyone else gets annoyed while
their builds fail), and thus a DSW breaks out and people spend
hours of their time being generally nasty and unproductive.
People need to think of backouts as a form of bookkeeping and not
as an admission of error.  They should also try to minimize their
occurrence, i.e. I shouldn't be able to read through the CVS logs
and predict ``uh oh, there's gonna be hell about this...''

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