mts06: part 4 - subversion and bagels

conference food breakfasts usually don’t intrigue me.  i’m not even a breakfast person — i hate it (yeah, most important meal of the day, blah, blah — leave me alone — i’m fat and getting fatter, so what.)

but this morning was different…

i sat down and was listening to brian behlendorf and others chat about source control and collaboration.  it was very intriguing to hear…some felt that source control isn’t necessary for even smaller samples sets due to the effort to even set it up.

i won’t iterate through the entire conversation, but one comment i felt was interesting was about how poeple (especially the open source community) are less likely to use anything if there isn’t an infrastructure for collaboration and evolation on that “thing” (read: sample, project, snippet, etc.).  i completely agree with this.  and i’ve personally fallen into that as well.  i’ve submitted samples, written code and even promised distribution, but simply haven’t done it with some things like feedreader.  i’m at fault.  this statement made me really realize how much better my code could be if that infrastructure was created around them.

one other comment that was interesting was almost the need to combine wiki-ish activity around this source collaboration…pointing out that checkin/checkout isn’t enough.  brian pointed out that viewvc introduces that functionality for subversion…

hmm…maybe gotdotnet needs to implement better collaboration to be more viral? — think it will happen ;-)?

tags: mts06