On Saturday 02 December 2006 18:11, Andrew N. Shrosbree wrote: > Yes, this does argue in favour of allowing the code to be branched so that > hackers can use (abuse?) the code as they see fit, but this would > necessitate ArgusConnect's washing its hands of responsibility for such > branched code. No, I am not being sarcastic or petulant: this seems like a > good solution, IMO.
I agree. The techie community at large (including me) is mostly interested in fixing their own problems and making things work for themselves. That it may help others too is a positive side effect that is not guaranteed. (That said, I could not find anything wrong with Syan's patches - what bits exactly do you object? He did it alone, in very little time, with very limited documentation, and my guess would be without any lengthy discussions with you regarding the general philosophy of the project, possibly without being exposed to the coding guidelines of your project - if these assumptions are true, I find it rather marvelous what he did) But yes, such process often (but not always) leads to "hacky" code that is difficult to maintain, and often not compatible with commercial grade code, at least not initially. I studied medicine as my second career because I found it terribly boring writing commercial grade code - always was only interested in getting the problem solved, not in honing and refining the solution; I am eternally grateful to those who have the patience and endurance to do it. Branching from a stable commercial grade code base is usually an evolutionary process, where most of those projects which succeed first spit out some code that does what is wanted, but has still problems - leading to several generations of code rewrites, until towards the end (if the project survives evolutionary selection) beautiful and highly maintainable code emerges. Examples where this happened: Interbase -> Firebird, Netscape->Mozilla, StarOffice -> OpenOffice Very few projects start with high quality code from the beginning - the KDE core project, Python, and Tridge's works (Samba, rsync) come to my mind as notable exception. Having looked at the KDE4 code base I must say I am not aware of more beautiful and maintainable code anywhere - a pleasure to read, as easy as a Python script, despite being C++. And yet, entirely anarchic community driven work since 10 years, without any commercial input. Would be nice to have such a branch of Argus where ease of mutual patching is kept in mind (major changes wherever possible isolated into modules, well documented), so that both versions can benefit from whatever the other side is doing, without either side being able to mess the other side's code up. If that would happen, I would even brush up my Java skills again... Don't think Argus would loose anything by doing it: the small minority that would go for the branching would all the more work towards widespread use, and as I said - if it does what I want, I am happy to pay Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
