[Vtigercrm-developers] caching user privileges

[Adam Heinz]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 4:08 AM, Manilal K M <libregeek at gmail.com> wrote:
> AFAIK, vtigercrm is no longer qualified as a community project. It's
> Open Source, but the developer's priority is always the On-Demand
> stuff and they patch(don't expect a diff, only over-writing) the
> so-called community version when they have *time*.

To this point, doing merges on such a large non-uniform subversion
codebase is brutal.  Other than the obvious monetary incentive to
attempt to get people to use the On Demand version over deploying
their own, I don't see any reason to develop in a hidden branch and
merge back to trunk. This defeats the point of trunk and introduces
unnecessary merge headaches.

Anyway, since there were a couple introductions in this thread
already, here's mine:

I've been doing professional software development for a dozen years or
so, about 50/50 desktop/web.  I do sysadmin-type stuff when I need to.
 I've done source control administration before, so I know a bit about
branch-on-policy-change and other source control design patterns, and
what a PITA merging can be if it's not managed well.  I do a fair bit
of server deployment these days and at some point hope to open source
my vtigercrm puppet module.  I've been working at my current position
a little over a year.  Between Bryan (a co-worker who gets credit for
some of the patches I upload) and I, we have about 1.5 FTE of
vtigercrm development.  We are producing a lot of code.  This brings
me to our current situation.

Merging stock 5.2.1 into our 5.0.4 fork was awful.  I seriously spent
almost a week doing the initial merge, then several weeks after that
finding and fixing broken behavior.  I don't ever want to do that
again.  That means that my best option is to split our proprietary
work into custom modules and get as many of my generally useful
changes into trunk as possible.  I have submitted less than ten
patches out of the roughly one thousand internal Bugzilla tickets we
fixed last year, but have had zero patches accepted.  This is
seriously throttling on my enthusiasm towards submitting additional
patches.

So how do we fix this situation?  First off, a centralized source
control model means that the onus is on vtiger to do this work
gratis.  They're a business, they have to keep the lights on, and if
that means they prioritize their On Demand offering over the community
edition, then it's unfortunate, but can we really fault them?  I'm
thinking out loud here, but what if they mirrored their On Demand svn
repository on GitHub, then we created a community fork off of that?