On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 11:00:02AM +0200, Ralf Stephan wrote:
pjrm:
- SPDesktop C++ification. This transformation was too rushed; has introduced at least two show-stoppers. Clean-up changes are good, but should be done cautiously, e.g. by breaking into small changes that can each be verified with reasonable confidence.
I started with small steps but they all involved recompiling a lot for cvs users. Grumbling started. What I blame myself for is not having branched then. OTOH, no one advised me to.
Actually I thought about this when you and I talked about it earlier.
I myself had also attempted to do the SPDesktop conversion prior to you but had also run into a variety of problems. I had tried to do it in one big go, but ran into a lot of problems, and so chucked the whole thing and started trying to do it bit by bit.
So... please don't feel bad about having run into some trouble here. I think it's that the conversion work is just difficult and is going to be hard work to complete successfully.
I would advocate pressing on and trying to get it to a stable point rather than backing it out. I've been debating this a bit with pjrm tonight but am not sure if I managed to convince him.
I think the SPDesktop work you're doing is very important, and worth delaying the release in order to bring it to stability. I don't know the details about the bugs encountered, but if they're what I suspect they are, it's not that there are fundamental architectural flaws or bad implementation decisions, but rather just the usual assortment of incompatibilities that come with the ripping and tearing of transplanting code and rearchitecting things around.
I think it's the right approach to bump us out of hard freeze to get these fixed, but I don't think it's necessary to back the whole change out.
The SPDesktop change has demonstrated itself not to be safe, so we'll back it out.
And possibly introduce previous bugs that just didn't show.
So I guess the order of things is: you revert, then I'll branch. Right?
Before we go to this extreme, can we see a listing of exactly what bugs we're concerned about? Maybe it's not as bad as we think.
Bryce