Image, 5. 12.

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

> -----Original Message-----
> On Monday, December 5, 2011 22:52:39 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > I was quite skeptical during the past weeks, but since last Wednesday I'm
> > really looking forward to the release date again!
> 
> this is an opportunity to modify our expectations.
> 
> we now know, thanks to this experience, that there will be breakages
> during
> development and things will at times be more chaotic than ordered as we
> make
> necessary changes.

Will these breakages really always be necessary? I read in this list about the plan to have an "always stable master", testing bigger changes in branches and only merging back to master when they work. Of course the exposure to more testing in master will likely uncover additional minor issues, but things like not being able to start applications anymore or the activity switcher disappearing should already be coming up when a few people test the branch. 
Maybe "skeptical" didn't really express it all that well anyway. I was never skeptical of Plasma Active as a project or of the people behind it. I was mostly frustrated because I wanted to give feedback to recent development but could not do so because all images produced in the few weeks before barely even booted. 
But I'm confident that moving critical changes to branches and only merging back if all basic functionality is working could reduce those situations to rare exceptions that can be fixed pretty fast. At least that's what happened at the company I last worked for: When we were still using CVS and doing everything in trunk, every now and then trunk was utterly broken. This got many developers and designers pretty angry because no one could work anymore until it was fixed, which sometimes took a few days.
After moving to mercurial and starting to use branches for bigger / more critical changes, the problem was reduced to a few minutes (or few hours at max) of fixing when merging the branches in again.

> we have also experienced that we can trust each other to work hard on
> fixing
> the fallout that occurs. we have experienced that the chaos-creating
> decisions
> are made for good reasons and with a clear understanding of the impacts
> these
> things decisions will bring in the short term.

I never doubted any of that. I _never_ thought "Those a**holes, why did they f§%&ing do that???" I was just frustrated because I could not do the work I wanted to do. And knowing that this was for a good reason and would eventually get fixed did not really help me at those very moments ;) 

> we are all open to feedback during these kinds of changes, we listen to
> each
> other and we all have Plasma Active's best interests at heart.
> 
> so the next time we go through such a period of apparent chaos, we can
> use
> this experience to skip over scepticism and panic and instead keep focused
> on
> chasing the goals at hand with positivity and optimism.
> 
> :)

I don't think anyone on the team lost their positivity and optimism at any point. Finding ways to reduce the phases of chaos in number and duration would still benefit everyone, wouldn't it? ;)

But working with you guys has been great all along and I guess everyone working on Plasma Active feels that way, despite momentary frustration.

Cheers,
Thomas