[WG: Sakai QA] [Building Sakai] KNL-155/SAK-16036/SAK-800:Resources archive filehandling issues

[David Haines]

Stephen,

	I think you have put your finger on the underlying issue.  How does  
incomplete code get into and stay in the production release?    
Pragmatically, commenting out the display of the zip feature in 2.6  
would keep the questionable code away from wide use, while letting  
those who need it available get it back trivially.  The issue I have  
with using the property to suppress it is that someone naive will turn  
that property on, have it not work, and say that Sakai is buggy.

	For one feature it doesn't matter too much what solution is chosen  
but once you get a few of those unwelcome decisions frozen into the  
production code base it becomes hard to manage and scary to change.   
Once code gets scary it gets abandoned.  The release folks shouldn't  
have to be in the situation to have to make these decisions.

- Dave


David Haines
CTools Developer
Digital Media Commons
University of Michigan
dlhaines at umich.edu



On Apr 18, 2009, at 10:39 AM, Stephen Marquard wrote:

> In general, I would also agree, but pragmatically given the  
> closeness to the release, the risk of backing it out is certainly  
> higher than commenting it out or making it disabled by default.
>
> And I think there are advantages in having a property for it that  
> help developers & QA move it towards production-grade quality. There  
> is lots of previous precedent for this for other "provisional"  
> features that were introduced, disabled by default, and sometimes  
> enabled by default on nightly servers to give them better testing  
> exposure.
>
> As far as this feature goes, I'd say it was problematic but not  
> completely broken as such. We've had it in production in our 2-6-x  
> build, and the only support issue that's come up is the Dropbox one.
>
> I think the bigger issue here is how quite so many features  
> additions destined for 2.6.0 (this one, rwiki, delayed  
> notifications, etc.) came to be committed in a functionally  
> incomplete state, and both the original developers and committers  
> were not available to address the resulting problems. We need to set  
> stronger expectations that if you contribute or commit code, you  
> need to support it at least through to the release.
>
> Regards
> Stephen
>
>>>> David Haines <dlhaines at umich.edu> 04/18/09 1:22 PM >>>
> I have to completely agree with Seth on this.
>
> - Dave
>
>
> David Haines
> CTools Developer
> Digital Media Commons
> University of Michigan
> dlhaines at umich.edu
>
>
>
> On Apr 17, 2009, at 10:06 PM, Seth Theriault wrote:
>
>> Anthony Whyte wrote:
>>
>>> Using properties to mask or otherwise hide incomplete or
>>> problematic code (see SAK-800) is not ideal.  However, given
>>> that at least one institution, Oxford, is comfortable using
>>> the code as is, renders problematic the simple and
>>> straightforward expedient of commenting out the
>>> functionality and forcing them into hack mode when
>>> implementing 2.6.0 or 2.6.x.
>>
>> I think that the "properties" approach sets an extremely bad
>> precedent. Broken and incomplete code should NEVER be
>> knowingly released, plain and simple.
>>
>> Apologies to Oxford, but if they are "comfortable" with
>> something that almost everyone is agreed is broken, they
>> should continue to patch it in until it gets in workable
>> condition and others start to adopt. That's what being on the
>> bleeding edge is all about.
>>
>> Seth
>>
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>
>
>
>

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