EngineController borked

[Jeff Mitchell]

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Dan Meltzer wrote:
> This is one of the reasons why trunk exists.  To get more testing for
> possibly dangerous features before they get released to a wider
> audience.  To randomly (and without warning, I might add) change
> trunks policies from a place where development happens to a place that
> is apparently expected to be as stable (if not more) than the released
> version, because it has to work for our "commercial parteners" (which,
> I might add, are some huge secret and, to be honest, completely
> tangental to the open source development which Amarok works under, I
> didn't sign up to do my work for a company, and a company should not
> drive the development of Amarok, sorry) is something that at the very
> least needs to be discussed in detail on the mailing list before it
> happens.

Dan, you are right in that trunk is a place where this kind of thing
*should* occur.  This was almost certainly some bugfix gone wrong, and
bugfixes don't really belong in branches...they belong in trunk where
they get testing.  Development for "commercial partners" should really
happen in a separate branch.

However, possibly because of the name Mark chose of "commercial
partners", in your email above at least you're thinking a bit too black
and white.  It is true that none of us originally started developing
Amarok to do our work for a company, but like many open source projects,
a company's investment helps encourage development.  We all know how
valuable Nikolaj's (*paid*) time has been for the development of Amarok
2 -- and there is no way he'd have contributed nearly as much or built
as much as he did without being able to work on it without worrying
about finding a job or income.  Mark's current employment with a company
requires him to do some Amarok work specifically for that company, yes,
but it also means that he's being paid to improve Amarok as a whole,
since stability and features affect his employer.  Better Mark is
working for a company that is paying him to improve Amarok than looking
for a job that might take him away from it.

Amarok having commercial partners is nothing to be apprehensive about,
so long as we ensure that the direction of the project lies with those
that create it, and partner-specific work that is not seen as an
improvement to Amarok as a whole lies in a separate branch.  So far our
limited history shows we're capable of doing this.

- --Jeff
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