Blog: Dislocated localizations

[Z98]

https://www.reactos.org/node/923

[Webunny]

https://www.reactos.org/node/923

Interesting read as always.

It does show, though, that it wouldn't be a bad idea if some system were set up where people communicate/check extra and beforehand what changes have been made, and what will happen to them. I think a lot, or at least some, regressions are simply due to things that get over-written, and no-body thought about it. Maybe some additional - actual or mental - 'checklist' should be made, to check all things that were changed and might get influenced, before a big merger is made. I know there is JIRA, and there are the logs of what has been changed, but clearly, sometimes things are overlooked, so an additional check before merging something, with a repository or knowledgeable devs, would avoid many unfortunate accidents like that.

[justincase]

I haven't had a whole lot of time to dedicate to testing ReactOS for a while, but I was supplying shell-experiments builds (even if they were a little behind a lot of the time), and the reason for that was so more people could test it and look for those bugs that the Devs didn't notice (like the language issues from the winesync).
And I must say that the "Oh yeah, I thought you knew." bit made me laugh It's funny how often people don't know things, simply because people assumed they already did, but you have to strike a balance, 'cause nobody likes to be told again & again about something that they're already dealing with, or that they've already dismissed.

Good luck all on continuing to make great improvements.

[jhol]

As you will most probably know (and if you don’t, you should take a look at the news on the front page!), the shell branch was merged last Wednesday evening, as a thanksgiving gift from the project to all the contributors. As things happen when a big merge is done and people with varied configurations start testing, it wasn’t 5 minutes that the first big “oh shit” bug report came in.

This is the symptom of a disease I like to call SVN-itus. The issue is that because SVN's support for branches is so poorly designed and cumbersome, people tend to avoid dealing with them. In an ideal world, branches would be cheap and easy to use, which makes it possible to be pro-active in finding problems on branches through peer-rewiew before they land, rather than only being able to be re-active - only responding to problems after everything gets broken.

This is why I recommend Git. Switching branches is so quick it's like switching TV channels, and the result is that you can have some proper quality control processes to make this kind of thing rather less of a burden.

[Black_Fox]

There's a git mirror available (but yeah, just a mirror) and I believe it's possible to use git-svn.
The main issue, though, is that even though there were ISOs made by gigaherz himself and by justincase, some of the people (including me!) just played with it a little and didn't test it thoroughly enough. Maybe I should have tried it in English as well, not just my native language, to detect the incorrect differences between them.

[gigaherz]

Yeah... some people have experimented with Git around reactos, too. Some of us toyed around with using Git-svn, so that we could use a git local copy while still using "git svn dcommit" to send things to svn, but last I heard there are some issues with that workflow, due to differences in how git and svn work internally.

So for now, until some better solution can be found (maybe a two-sided solution where both a git server and an svn server are synchronized with eachother, maybe something else), we'll keep using svn.

[Frontier]

I believe such a thing is actually in the works.

[gigaherz]

I believe such a thing is actually in the works.

Question is if it will work well enough to be implemented. I don't want to get excited for nothing... ;P

[Z98]

I fail to see what relation branches have to this bug cropping up. This was basically lack of testing coverage.

[gigaherz]

I fail to see what relation branches have to this bug cropping up. This was basically lack of testing coverage.

Yeah it's not directly related, but it is true that SVN branches aren't the best. Compared to Git or Hg, for which branches are everything since their commits are bound to a parent, and a branch is just a pointer to a commit (and the history goes back from parent to parent), SVN branch/tag system is very clumsy, slow, and often glitchy.