On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 11:06 PM, Anne Archibald wrote: Hi, Linux has Linus, ipython has Fernando, nipy has... well, I'm sure it is
somebody. Numpy and Scipy no longer have a central figure and I like it On 27 May 2010 01:55, Matthew Brett way. There is no reason that DVCS has to inevitably lead to a central
authority. I think I was trying to say that the way it looks as if it will be -
before you try it - is very different from the way it actually is when
you get there. Anne put the idea very well - but I still think it is
very hard to understand, without trying it, just how liberating the
workflow is from anxieties about central authorities and so on. You
can just get on with what you want to do, talk with or merge from
whoever you want, and the whole development process becomes much more
fluid and productive. And I know that sounds chaotic but - it just
works. Really really well. One way to think of it is that there is no "main line" of development.
The only time the central repository needs to pull from the others is
when a release is being prepared. As it stands we do have a single
release manager, though it's not necessarily the same for each
version. So if we wanted, they could just go and pull and merge the
repositories of everyone who's made a useful change, then release the
results. Of course, this will be vastly easier if all those other
people have already merged each other's results (into different
branches if appropriate). But just like now, it's the release
manager's decision which changes end up in the next version. No, at this point we don't have a release manager, we haven't since 1.2. We
have people who do the builds and put them up on sourceforge, but they
aren't release managers, they don't decide what is in the release or
organise the effort. We haven't had a central figure since Travis got a real
job ;) And now David has a real job too. I'm just pointing out that that
projects like Linux and IPython have central figures because the originators
are still active in the development. Let me put it this way, right now, who
would you choose to pull the changes and release the official version?
Chuck