Hi, the urgent need for the code restructurings and other work under the hood that Tom and Bob pointed out is something that I absolute agree with. My frustration came from the fact that this takes so much time that not much beyond this is achieved. The basic problem seems to be that we have too few resources for all the work that needs to be done. So there happens to be some selection, for *example* (% of achievement): 1. restructurings 75% 2. library+repository upgrades 9% 3. API maintainance 9% 4. bug fixes 5% 5. new features 2% >From a users point of view, this progress over time is not much better than >just doing nothing, so the natural conclusion is: "hey, this project is dead". >All this is not a solution, nor is there any accusation, but just expresses >what I feel about this project. (BTW: I must admit that the subject of this >thread is kind of wrong, maybe it was too provoking.)
Maybe we should overcome this image problem by choosing one of the big eye-catching issues, like the missing Undo or the UML2 issue, and come up with a quick solution even if it's not the optimal way from a technical view. Example: use a UML2 repository with our UML1.4 API (I thought the Model API was designed to allow a quick repository change?) while not (yet) supporting ANY UML2 feature and simply declare ArgoUML as an UML2 tool. (Technically nonsense, but will get some attention, at least ArgoUML won't be thrown out in numerous tool evaluations.) This is just an example. The reason why this is not happening is, because we are uncoordinated and just technically driven. There is no balance between technical needs and "marketing" needs. There is no written mission statement for the next release(s). There is no commonly accepted decision, everybody works on what he wants. So one problem is a governance problem. Another problem I see is the knowledge base of the project. Active living are only the dev mailing list and issuezilla. Good, but not sufficient for quickly see what's our overall direction, what the currently hot topics are and which is their current state, not structured and not easy editable. I'm still VERY MUCH for a Wiki solution here. (BTW it's very hard in issuezilla to find the key issues among the thousands of minor or outdated issues, but this could be fixed, hopefully.) And some other problem is (this directly relates to my previous mail): we developers have a hard time contributing to ArgoUML, because one immediately gets into the deepest code reorganisation problems when joining the project. Let it be enhancements of the graphical appearance of diagrams or CG/RE or whatever. You want to help enhance ArgoUML, and suddenly you're lost in many deep tasks you originally were not interested in for a looong time. Might be a reason why we are so few developers. (Again, I have no solution but wanted to express my feelings.) Would be nice if we had some abstracion layers so that there really could be different types of developers (which leads me to the subject of the thread). Introducing modules and subsystems was a very good and visionary step, thanks Linus and others! Bob wrote: > Why do you think that someone would be so motivated to only be > interested in working on the framework and maintaining other peoples > code? I would not urge someone to do this, but we all have proven that we are willing to work "under the hood" if a particular feature or an overall idea convinces us. E.g., I was happy to help getting the CG/RE code "NSUML free" very early back then. Also, I see a lot of willingness to help someone else with his code, which is great! Kudos to the team. Bob wrote: > If the work done so far had not happened then we'd still have one > horrible lump of spaghetti code still at UML1.3 and all the features > thrown into that lump would quite simply not be used now. The > spaghetti is unravelling gradually, thought needs to be put in by > everybody so as not to move us backwards again. Tom wrote: > If you're not familiar with the concept of "technical debt," take a > minute to read http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TechnicalDebt. ArgoUML has such > a mountain of technical debt that it can barely pay the interest. The > team can either keep borrowing until it collapses into bankruptcy or > it can chip slowly away at the debt until it's manageable. I agree with both of you, maybe I was too biased toward implementing new features. I'm talking about a good balance here, and that we are a little unbalanced, which make the project look dead from outside. Tom wrote: > p.s. I bet there are some users that care, but because we're not > engaged in a conversation with them, we've go no way of knowing. I too believe there ARE users, let's get involved here: http://www.argouml-users.net/forum/ I put some hope in pushing both the users mailing list and this forum by some yelling on the website (I work on this), and by links in the new Help page of Andreas, that will be distributed with 0.26 soon. Regards, Thomas -- GMX startet ShortView.de. Hier findest Du Leute mit Deinen Interessen! Jetzt dabei sein: http://www.shortview.de/[EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
