On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 6:58 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
I don't see any evidence to support what you're saying. For the past half-decade or so, there have only been two people doing general code updates: Tim and Brion. Both are now out of commission, from what I understand. We've both noted that others have the technical ability to do general code updates, but I don't believe that anyone else has (or has the social ability to do so).
There is no reason to believe that Tim and Brion couldn't both be around to help oversee the big general code update that will be needed when the current review is done. It's a one-time deal, after all. After that, there are plenty of people who could handle regular incremental code updates, like Roan.
To put it another way, if the code backlog were eliminated today, I think the exact same frustrations and annoyances would exist among the developer community because the code would sit reviewed, but un-deployed. When we say "the biggest issue is a huge code review backlog," it's misleading. The reality is that the biggest issue is a huge code review _and deployment_ backlog.
I don't see any reason why deployment would lag far behind review. Review takes a lot of time, deployment is quick. We'd just need a lot of people on hand to do damage control when stuff breaks unexpectedly after such a huge deployment.
Broadly, I don't see any reason why it's beneficial to engage in Great Reveal-style code updates to the site. There are thousands of uncontroversial revisions already reviewed that could be deployed today.
I don't think it would be wise at all to try deploying something less than trunk. Deploying trunk means we can commit any fixes to trunk and only trunk. Branching some earlier point and deploying that would mean we have to maintain the branch. Plus, we'd have to have several large deployments instead of one giant one. Better to have one giant deployment so that there's at most one point of massive user inconvenience, and then stick to only small ones from then on.
who's going to be doing general code updates in the future?
There are plenty of candidates, including Tim, Roan, and Trevor. It's kind of trivial to do the actual deployment, you just need to make sure people are around to fix any breakage.
And subsequent to that, is there any reason to hold off on deploying incrementally?
IMO, no.