David Rush wrote:
2009/1/14 Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca:
One thing that might also help is to have one or more experimental branches on the source code repository in addition to the master branch. The experimental branches would be under the control of individuals or groups of developers with a specific interest. When a feature has matured on an experimental branch it could be merged with the master branch.
Pardon me if I am being thick here, but isn't that the point of using a distributed SCM like Git or (as formerly) Mercurial? Every checkout is a branch...
I think the point is that Marc is encouraging others to go ahead and work on and publish their own branches.
Of course if nobody else knows enough about the internals to do any work, this won't happen, that's the point Brad is making.
I think we're aware of this situation. Some development is happening covertly, maybe for historic, maybe for cultural (academic environment) reasons, maybe it would be good to make this more open so that others are getting more chance for learning; but as I mentioned previously, systems which are being developped fully openly may gain much momentum but need not become more useful in the end. So I'm going to shut up and contribute.
Christian.