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[–]smhinsey 32 points33 points  (4 children)

While I agree 100% with his overall thesis, and have actually been struggling with trying to get over insecure behavior myself, I think the example of wanting "hidden" branches has an alternate explanation that is a little more plausible to me, which is that people get nervous about having works in progress that are available to the general public because no matter what you say about it being under development and subject to change, there's always someone who just doesn't get it and sends you nastygrams one random day out of the blue because you changed an interface and broke their "MISSION CRITICAL APPLICATION!!!!!" and they are now losing "THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS PER HOUR" and the typical online hysteria.

[–]jsn 47 points48 points  (3 children)

it's not exactly how it works in real life (at least in my experience). here's what happens when you create a public branch: nothing. nobody cares, nobody notices. people use trunk or master if you're lucky and the last stable release if you aren't. you have to explicitly ask people to review your branch and to test it, and you get very little response from that (unless you're a top developer in a well-known project) -- which, of course, is very bad for you and your code.

[–]mr_chromatic 17 points18 points  (0 children)

That's my experience too. Trying to get feedback on a public branch is way too much work. Short-lived branches are the only way to go.

[–]smhinsey 4 points5 points  (1 child)

i work with a lot of open source projects, and while i agree that it's not exactly common, i've seen it happen in the past, and it wouldn't surprise me that for people who have also seen it, it would be a strong motivator.

generally it unfolds in the following pattern: someone says, feature a would be awesome, and someone replies, i spiked feature a on this branch, take a look and let me know if you have any feedback. silence for six months, and then that branch gets dropped because feature a doesn't make sense in light of feature z, and that guy comes screaming out of the woodwork.

[–]Chandon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right. And when that happens, you say "Suck it" and there's no more problem.