It’s important to note that this is them moving in-development branches/features “behind closed doors”, not making Android closed source. Whenever a feature is ready they then merge it publicly. I know this community tends to be filled with purists, many of whom are well informed and reasoned, but I’m actually totally fine with this change. This kind of structure isn’t crazy uncommon, and I imagine it’s mainly an effort to stop tech journalists analysing random in-progress features for an article. Personally, I wouldn’t want to develop code with that kind of pressure.
Not only that, the Android Police article mentions they had a lot of trouble merging the internal branches and the public branches, so I’m guessing as time went on they’ve diverged more and more.
Heck, I’ll sometimes make a wip.diff file and scp it back and forth between work and home machines just because the code feels not ready for other eyes.
It’s important to note that this is them moving in-development branches/features “behind closed doors”, not making Android closed source. Whenever a feature is ready they then merge it publicly. I know this community tends to be filled with purists, many of whom are well informed and reasoned, but I’m actually totally fine with this change. This kind of structure isn’t crazy uncommon, and I imagine it’s mainly an effort to stop tech journalists analysing random in-progress features for an article. Personally, I wouldn’t want to develop code with that kind of pressure.
I’m not a fan, but I understand it and am generally okay with it. I still wish it all happened in the open like Linux.
Not only that, the Android Police article mentions they had a lot of trouble merging the internal branches and the public branches, so I’m guessing as time went on they’ve diverged more and more.
Why would you want people to test your software on all sorts of random hardware when you could just pay people to test it on a smaller scale!
C’mon, that’s what PR’s, RCs, and betas are for
Would you really want everyone in the world looking at every end of day commit before you’ve refactored it into something vaguely passable?
Heck, I’ll sometimes make a
wip.difffile and scp it back and forth between work and home machines just because the code feels not ready for other eyes.While I’m way too lazy to do that myself, I respect you for the skill and effort.
Who tf looks at feature branches unless it’s particularly relevant to them or they’re reviewing a PR?
It’s not like they merge half-baked features straight to master every day lol
So what exactly are we losing?