So, now I'm a "kid" (with the obvious insinuation that I'm dumb and inexperienced) if I think maybe perhaps version control is a good idea, especially for open source projects that actually want contributions? Neat.
And git is "bloatware"? Is that guy running on a Commodore 64 or something? Bizarre.
Funny you should criticize the postfix community for this. Did you see what they are responding to?
Source control (SCM/VCS) is a MUST have. It's unbelievable that people just work with tarballs without proper source control. It doesn't matter which you use, but it must be available. Sending patches over email is what people did last century...
I think the "kids these days" comment was in reference to someone waltzing in, contributing nothing, and demanding everything immediately be done their way.
"i would suggest that you ask questions first or be quiet the postfix author is using a VCS but he do not need to provide access to you or me "
Anyone can criticise anything for any reason.
Criticism is so easy to generate that it is worth absolutely nothing.
The process they use works for them.
I guarantee that I could come into your place of work and criticise pretty much everything you do, pointing out that there is a better way of doing it (because there will be, from some angle).
This is not useful, and whether or not I am correct on any specific point it is unlikely to be well received.
Rejecting widely accepted good/necessary practice like that for no apparent reason other than "it's working for us so far" is stupid, arrogant, irresponsible, and wrong.
In this case, however, the criticism is unfounded because Postfix is using source control internally. Whether the system is exposed to the public is inconsequential as long as it's being used.
There is no way you can spin it as anything even remotely close to okay if there was no change tracking in the Postfix project at all.
That was never appropriate.
Some projects do not want contributors. It belongs to the maintainer. Knowing what not to put in is sometimes the best way to keep good code.
What does that have to do with exposing a read only versioned history? Nobody is asking him to give the whole world commit privileges.
ftp://ftp.porcupine.org/mirrors/postfix-release/index.html
It's tarballs for each release, with associated patches for each release. That's a pretty complete read only versioned history.
Why does it have to be a VCS?
And because they already have a VCS, and are just stubbornly unwilling to share all that useful information with the wider community.
I get that this clashes with the culture you're used to working in, but I don't see where it's actually impactful in a real world sense.
edit: a slight rewording
Giving Weitse the benefit of the doubt, his commit logs are probably very useful indeed, and not sharing them makes the codebase that much less useful to everyone else.
Edit to add: the canonical example is bisection. When something breaks, it is awesome to bisect it down to the precise change that broke it. Bisection lets you narrow the scope down to a vastly smaller problem space than a whole release would.
(*) Which is awesome for many/most projects. But there a valid reasons not to want it.
You're misreading the thread. The specific comment was:
> kids these days see every software development/maintenance task as something that must get crushed under a git-shaped sledgehammer regardless of whether that's the reasonable or sensible thing to do.
which is seems more like a knock against git and possibly the culture around sites like github, than against version control per se. One person in the thread does say that the author uses VCS, but doesn't make it public.
The contributors to the project seem happy with the current setup and workflow, and frankly the guy who was looking for a public repository was kind of a dick about it.