On 26 September 2011 20:44, Michael Mol <mike...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yeah, I just saw that. Admittedly, when I saw this section: > > --begin-section-- > > I'll add at this point that this isn't just a programmer problem. I've > seen entire companies get locked into the idea that “perfecting” the > program was everything. They then neglected what the users wanted from > the program, supporting the users and so on. Most of us who've been in > the business for a while have seen this cycle play out over and over > again. > > Expanding on that second point, Torvalds says that's why the Linux > kernel team is “so very anal about the whole ‘no regressions’ thing, > for example. Breaking the user experience in order to ‘fix’ something > is a totally broken concept; you cannot do it. If you break the user > experience, you may feel that you have ‘fixed’ something in the code, > but if you fixed it by breaking the user, you just violated that > second point; you thought the code was more important than the user. > Which is not true.” > > --end-section-- > > I immediately thought of the udev thread.
The only problem with that attitude is that it eventually leads you to the same position that Microsoft is in with Windows -- where too many years of refusing to drop backwards compatibility were completely holding them back. The direction that they took with Windows XP, drop raw DOS support, release-freeze (9 years!), gather bug reports, fix bugs(!), has actually left them with a pretty stable and functional OS in Windows 7 (The release candidate was not quite as strong). If you read the Old New Thing, you will still find some absolute madness left in there to maintain support for Win3.1 programs, and hacked around in some really awful ways. Breaking User Experience is a major factor of open-source, it's iterative though, and the general consensus is that each generation of software improves on the previous one (that said, I'm pretty worried about the directions of both gnome3 and kde4).
