Next focus: PROCESS

[Rob T]

On Sunday, 16 December 2012 at 08:52:24 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>
> So distro's versioning system is good for a programming 
> language because you use it successfully in your software which 
> isn't a programming language (and we also don't know according 
> to which goal it is successful) ?

Let's not get different things mixed together.

There is a compiler, which is software. There is a language, but 
it is not software, it's the specification that the compiler 
implements.

It does not matter how branches are versioned, what matters is 
how they move from a highly unstable state towards an 
increasingly stable state until it is released in stable form for 
the end-user to use.

I will agree with you that there are unique challenges for a 
compiler, however we're not really talking about a compiler 
specifically at this stage, we're talking about establishing a 
way of moving source code from an unstable form into a stable 
form. What the compiler needs to achieve is a totally different 
concept, which is unfortunately not well documented. There is the 
current language specification, which is improperly managed as I 
pointed out in a previous post, and there needs to be certain 
guidelines set for the compiler to follow that are not a part of 
the language specification, but we're straying way off course at 
this point - those problem areas will have to be dealt with 
later, otherwise absolutely nothing at all will get done. There's 
just too many things to fix up around here, so we have to pick 
and chose very carefully what to deal with first before moving on 
to the next problem.

> By the way, debian testing is not what you think it is : 
> http://www.debian.org/devel/testing.en.html

I think that I do know what Debian testing is. I do understand 
that the Debian distro is made up out of individual packages, but 
these packages can be generalized to what goes on when software 
is developed. For example, new features = new packages, code 
modifications = updated packages. When you distill things down to 
a process level, the payload managed by the process no longer 
matters so much.

--rt