Bear's Log

While sitting here waiting to see if the rollback I just did is successful, I was catching up on some blog reading. I won’t go into messy details about why I had to rollback some changes or the fun fact that my own “quick fix” caused the tree to go red for a couple hours - nope, won’t go into it ;)

Instead I’ll echo the sentiment that preed said last week in his blog posting A Builder in a Build Land – it’s hard finding either current or relevant to open source information about build/release methods and/or tools. Like preed, I tend to find either really large cumbersome commercial options or “hey! this is what I did this past weekend” items.

Not that there isn’t any good information out there, there is and I’ve been slowly building up a list of bookmarks that I always scan when I have a problem to solve. But that’s not the current point of my ramblings.

The current point is a question I have to ask myself - do I step up and try to help solve this issue? Now I’m not talking about being the end-all to the world of SCM – heck, there are a lot of commercial vendors in that space. Instead I’m talking about the world of Bonsai, Tinderbox and the like. Those tools that small shops try out because they can’t (or don’t want to) spend half their development budget on SCM.

It’s a tough call, my personal time is already slim as it is (heck, I still have to finish the Bonsai SVN changes) and work is keeping me very busy (thankfully :).

But I think that’s the answer also - work is keeping me busy because of the fact that I’m running around dealing with little changes here and there to support the different environments that are found at OSAF. Maybe if I started to map out some common features, things that cause me to wince and out-right deficiencies I would find out that my list is very similar to preed’s.

If you think about it there are a myriad of little tools (and some big ones) that are good and just need some thought but I have also found that there is a bunch of tools that are being used just because they work just enough so as to be below the damn-this-sucks-I-have-rewrite-it threshold.

One thing I would have to do is put myself even further into the info-stream that has become the google-verse and deal with the issues that brings along, another is that I would have to get my shit together and do more than my job. Posting and trying to change the build landscape is a lot harder than just keeping OSAF’s builds running.

gotta chew on it some