Maybe your case should be an exception, but in general I completely agree with Ben's policy.Ben's policy does nothing useful towards that and in fact greatly increases the time it takes for certain bugs to get fixed.Ben's policy assures that IMP is basically working.
We can not trust changes made by anyone and even in big software companies ( such as google), every change should go through a code review process.First of all, a large working code base should be treated differently from research code that is still young. But yes, code reviews are good.
However, no one is actually reviewing any of the code that is being submitted now. Ben spends time on pointless formatting issues, but I can count the number of bugs he has found from actually looking at the code on one finger :-) (more or less)
Further, I have accidentally committed a number of things that would have been caught by anyone paying attention to the code (I saw them as soon as I looked again). In addition, a significant fraction of the issues that we encounter are things that have been created in the process of preparing patches since that is so much more complicated than it has to be.
IMP is being used by various people, some without formal CS background and some are more flexible and tolerant than others.Sure, but there is no reason for them to be accessing the main svn directly. SVN is for people who want to develop IMP. That is why projects have point releases.
Just an example, today Frido and I, for our 26S project, updated IMP and than it took us at least an hour to solve all of the broken interfaces. This happens a lot and some people might give up on IMP or just use an old version and never update ( Frank's MODELLER 3 in restrainer is an extreme case for that).Yes, IMP is still changing, sometimes too much. However, that has nothing to do with the question at hand. Code review just perhaps prevents accidental breakages, those changes were all intentional and reviewed.
Code will move from the nightly to the weekly only after testcases have been written and passed a code review process.what do you think?
That is what I proposed :-) Good cartoon.