[sword-devel] sword svn

[Chris Little]

Jonathan Marsden wrote:
> Matthew Talbert wrote:
> 
>> I subscribe to sword-svn as an attempt to educate myself on the
>> library, and, of course, to keep track of current changes. It would be
>> a real help to me if the commit messages were longer and more
>> informative. As I am very new to a lot of the engine stuff, it is hard
>> to tell just by looking at the commits what problem they are
>> attempting to solve.
> 
> +1
> 
> I've not (yet?) subscribed to sword-svn, but I have grabbed the svn tree 
> and looked through svn log to see what has been changing and why.  Like 
> you, I found the commit messages somewhat cryptic.
> 
> Ideally, I think bugs and enhancements would appear and be described in 
> a bug tracker, and then VCS commit msgs can include something like 
> (Fixes: #12345) so that there is a pointer to more verbose info on the 
> "why" of any given change.  While I'd love to see something like that 
> for SWORD, I don't know if that approach is reasonable/feasible for the 
> SWORD developers, and it is their code, not mine -- at this point I am 
> very much just a "lurker" when it comes to that code :)

This scheme would work fine if folks would use the bugtracker (i.e. not 
report bugs only to sword-devel or in the wiki). When I fix things in 
the library that I notice myself, I don't tend to file a bug report 
before fixing them--I just fix them--and I would expect others who work 
on the library to do likewise. I only open new bugs in the tracker for 
things that I don't intend to fix myself or that I don't intend to fix soon.

Not filing bug reports in the tracker is generally just a good way to 
have your bug be ignored because it will quickly be forgotten. The 
bugtracker provides nice persistence.

--Chris