Thursday, July 5, 2007

The Adium Project

In our latest podcast episode, we were joined by three mentors for the Adium project: Colin Barrett, David Smith and Peter Hosey. You'll get a chance to hear about their current students' progress and changes Adium has made to its processes for participating in Summer of Code. You'll also hear more about their plans to add IRC support to Adium, and about the trials of being an SoCer smacked with a deprecated Cocoa-Java bridge.

Many thanks to Colin, David and Peter for joining us.

You can directly download the podcast or you can subscribe to it. We love feedback, so post a comment and let us know what you think.

Enjoy the show!

6 comments:

Greg said...

Regarding the use of a distributed repository to complete a feature and then push it to the main/public repository: I really don't think that would be helpful for the student. Let's say that they spend 3 weeks working on the feature across 60 local commits. Can *anybody* in the community see that work? Help out during the feature development? Provide feedback and guidance? Provide hints and information to get the student past a difficult spot? No no no.

Having each commit go to the main repository means that the Adium team can be involved and help the student. It also means that they can review the incremental work rather than the monster review at the end of the feature, which you guys already know is difficult from your comments about last year.

David Smith said...

I agree; I think concerns about distributed VCS promoting isolation are quite possibly justified. That said, a correctly (for values of correct applying to this particular concern) designed DVCS should be able to be used in a more centralized manner while still providing niceties like local branches when useful.

Kai said...

This largely depends on the project I would say. For projects like Wine that have a "single committer" model, a DVCS is nice. I think the solution is to make the student publish his branch somewhere his mentor and/or other people can review it.

Peter Hosey said...

Kai: And Subversion does that quite well. ☺

iGor Feghali said...

I definitely agree with Greg. I am a student tied to PHP working on a PEAR project. Every commit I do goes to the central repository plus gets mailed to PEAR-CVS mail list where many PEAR devs are subscribed. This model makes the information much more accessible and so it is easier to get a feedback. In fact I do often get replies for my commits, being it a "why are you doing that this way?" or even a "glad you are working on this feature". This model is also very helpful to keep dependent packages sync'ed.

Chloe said...

Guys, I think you're going to have to work on your pronunciation! ;)

"Erik B."