On Mon, 11 Aug 2008, Frederik Ramm wrote: > Gerv also hinted at the fact that JOSM is written in a way that is > somewhat untypical for Java, and whenever a newcomer to JOSM programming > said "this is all bullshit let's refactor it wholesale" I told them to > please find another project to refactor wholesale. I always thought that > the peculiar way in which JOSM is done has a lot going for it and makes > it easy to work with the code. > > That having said, if at any time someone who has already done a lot of > JOSM development would step forward and suggest major changes, I believe > that would be a whole different thing than coming from someone who has > yet to submit a single patch.
Actually that's true for every project. I once refactored freeciv (a C coded game) to use correct header files and touched nearly every source file in there. freeciv had/has a pretty active development and they stopped patch acception for approx. one and a half day to get that done (Only 4 or 5 people had CVS account - I did not have). I programmed for freeciv half a year at this time. To a newcomer they would have said: Go away. And I would say the same to everyone. BTW: I never would suggest or accept "major" changes. Every major change can be cut in pieces and introduced as smaller changes. This means you always have a stable working software compared to a large refactoring period. You have to write some intermediary code, but that also means half finished reworks (when the author no longer has time or interest) are better than nothing :-) Ciao -- http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available) _______________________________________________ josm-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/josm-dev
