dolfin team mailing list archive

[Johan Jansson <jjan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 01:29:02PM +0200, Anders Logg wrote:
> I'm not so sure I like the branched development we have now with a
> separate dolfin-kth. The consequence of this development is that the
> core development takes place in the main dolfin tree (mostly by Garth
> and myself), while you work on your own things in dolfin-kth.
> 
> If you instead worked in the main dolfin tree, you would be forced to
> keep up with and contribute to the development of the core
> functionality which I would like better.
> 
> I think separate trees should be something that we create temporarily
> for testing and implementing new features before merging back into the
> main tree. It should not be something permanent since it would then in
> practice be a fork.
> 
> /Anders

The main reason for having a separate, stable branch is to enable
non-core DOLFIN developers to participate in module development. We
have some students here at KTH using DOLFIN for example, and they are
probably not able (or willing) to be forced to contribute to core
development. The result of simultaneous core and module development
for them is time wasted and perhaps eventually project failure because
they never get started with their main work

How are you managing this with your students in Delft Garth?

But sure, perhaps the branching does not need to be permanent. We
could define the main branch as stable, and then when we make changes
which might break core functionality, we make a temporary unstable
branch.

I think we're doing ok on balancing core development and other
duties. If you try to do everything at once and overextend yourself,
then you usually lose perspective and creativity in my
experience. Perhaps some more time should be spent on maintenance, but
as I said, I think we're doing pretty ok.

For the longer term, we should plan how to engage more core developers
(as well as module developers). There's much interest in FEniCS, so we
should be able to achieve that. I think we have some good ideas,
perhaps we can discuss those kinds of topics at FENICS'06 as well.

  Johan