Christopher Smith wrote:
Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:
On Nov 13, 2007, at 2:56 AM, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
And yet no one did build a better browser, and almost nobody
helped Mozilla. One of the complaints that jwz made a *long* way
back was how little help the community supplied for a very long
time.
My recollection from the other side was that people were
complaining of how staggeringly difficult it was to get up to speed
on the existing Netscape 4 code before they could understand enough
to become useful.
Certainly, not an ideal situation from either side of the fence.
Yes, and I've heard Mozilla developers describe this as one of the
reasons why having the Netscape 4 code was more of a disadvantage
than an advantage.
And, yet, they could have easily written test cases, bugs, etc. to help
bring themselves up to speed.
This complaint was the same as for *any* large project.
I hear this from people who wish to contribute to the kernels of the
free operating systems--both Linux and FreeBSD. I hear this from people
who wish to contribute to X11. This is not new.
This is a continuing failure of most open source projects. It takes
less effort and is more gratifying to write something that kinda works
60% of the time rather than understand all those nasty bits of the code
that works 99% of the time.
Lispniks are *famous* for this.
JWZ has a nice, trenchant comment about this:
http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
In February 2003, a bunch of the outstanding bugs I'd reported
against various GNOME programs over the previous couple of years were
all closed as follows:
Because of the release of GNOME 2.0 and 2.2, and the lack of interest
in maintainership of GNOME 1.4, the gnome-core product is being
closed. If you feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME 2, please
reopen it and refile it against a more appropriate component.
Thanks...
This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open
source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they
go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module
is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered
to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known
problems that existed in the previous version.
I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's
call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT"
for short.
It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of
from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why
not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is
followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?
But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do
the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun;
going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from
scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and
so that's what happens, over and over again.
-a
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