Good fences make good projects? [LWN.net]

Good fences make good projects?

Posted Nov 10, 2011 20:20 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647)
Parent article: Good fences make good projects?

Another argument that was brought up during that thread was that it can be harder for outsiders to work with and contribute to the code when it's part of a larger tree. For example, someone mentioned a feature of perf, and I wanted to take a quick look at perf source. It took me 15 minutes to update my kernel tree and checkout the latest copy. Having a separate git repository for perf would have made that much easier and quicker.

That might not be a practical problem for perf is because many perf users already have a kernel tree that they're working in. But the developer sets don't always overlap like that.

As a real-world example, the monolithic X11 tree was always a bit overwhelming. My friend used to hack a feature he liked into xterm, and it was always a hassle to get the whole tree and figure out how to get just xterm to build. When it was easily broken out into a separate autoconf'ed package around 2005, that became MUCH easier for him to do.

The discussions of pros/cons from the X11 modularization might still be relevant to this situation.

(Log in to post comments)