On Friday 13 July 2007 21:39, Melchior FRANZ wrote: [snip...] > > Coders are all the time adding new code, which can sometimes > be chaotic. On the other hand, coders are also fixing chaotic > code. All the time. Yes, there is some, but as long as you aren't > actually working on the code, it shouldn't really concern you > much. Are you aware of people who were scared away by the "chaos", > and decided not to contribute because of it? Which files or > subsystems do you find most chaotic? I'm sure we can work on > those. > > m.
I think this is a very important observation by Melchior, although he and I might disagree on both the degree and effects of the 'chaos' in FG :) The earliest FG mailing list posts I have archived date from late 2002 so I reckon that is when I started contributing to FG and since then there has been a huge amount of development in FG, all to it's benefit and leading to a much more capable and effective package. However, as well as the software developers who are developing the FG platform/framework itself there are those who use and develop _for_ the FG platform, for example aircraft developers who make aircraft for FG and development & research projects that use FG as their environmental framework. For this group of people/users I would say that the FG platform has become much more chaotic and difficult to use or to develop for unless they 'freeze' a local version and don't try to keep track of FG development after the freeze. Doing this though, will make their work incompatible with future versions of FG, which cannot be a good thing. It is difficult to see a good answer to this issue. On the one hand, planning ahead and setting specific objectives for the FG developers to work towards would give known objectives and a clear development path but at the same time would constrain developers to working on what the plan requires, which may not be what the individuals concerned are interested in. On the other hand, if FG development carries on as it is now, with developers able to follow any line of development they find interesting there will be many new valuable developments but it will continue to be unpredictable and chaotic. Perhaps FG has reached the point where it positively needs some sort of oversight management and planning, as seems to happen with many, if not most, large-scale Open-source projects e.g. Apache, Wine etc. I personally hate to be even a little bit critical of FG and it's community of developers because FG is a tremendous achievement by a lot of very skilled and talented individuals but it's because I do care about FG that I feel obliged to comment when I believe I see something that could harm the project. LeeE ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
