EngineController borked

[Dan Meltzer]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Jeff Mitchell <mitchell at kde.org> wrote:
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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.

Agreed, though at this point it's hard to say if it's a regression or
not, considering the enginecontroller had similar problems in 2.0.1
(I'm not sure if it's the same cause or not, however, it's hard to
differentiate between reasons why it "stops playing" at times)

>
> 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.

I also agree with this to a point. I may have made it a bit too black and white.
However, the main point I wanted to make, is that this commercial
partner pays Mark to make things work in a certain way.  They don't
pay anyone else.  This means that no one else should feel responsible
for making things work in a certain way.  We all want Amarok to become
a better product, but no one pays me to dig into enginecontroller to
make things work (which is more than fine) but to expect the community
to put effort into a certain direction because its the direction a
commercial partner wishes to go (in general, not in this case
necessarily) sets a dangerous precedent.

To be upset that things are not working ideally is fine, to expect
people to drop everything and make certain things work ideally, when
other things are equally as broken (collection management, little
things all over the place..) is a bit of a stretch, at least in my
opinion.

>
> 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.

And yes, I agree with this.  Having commercial sponsorship is
definitely a benefit in terms of man hours.

Dan,
>
> - --Jeff
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