On Sat, Apr 09, 2016 at 10:35:14AM +0200, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote: > almost every single sizeable project that chose the route of a (near) > rewrite from scratch died, or the rewrite never took off.
Firstly, I was speaking somewhat generally. I'm not suggesting that mutt needs to be rewritten in its entirety. Some of it is quite modular and most of it is reusable. Though, I haven't really made an effort to read over the code to evaluate that, as TBH I really don't have the time or the inclination right now. > but then, "it's so bad, we have to rewrite it from scratch" just attests > a lack of imagination .... Not necessarily. When a code base gets into this state, it's not necessarily the case that refactoring is impossible; it's that doing a good job requires that the person(s) doing the refactor necessarily need to be intimately familiar with the code in its entirety, in order to understand what changes need to be made to acheive the desired outcome without breaking anything. In such cases, it's often much less effort for someone or several someones to lay out a design and implement it. The important details are already in their head, and the rest can be made up as you go, to a large extent. Admittedly, it's more likely to be successful in a commercial environment, where there's significant (and monetary) incentive to do the work. But there are at least some examples even in OSS that have been successful. It just depends on finding people with the motivation to do the work. > > Where I work, some teams have had a "make the smallest useful change" > > policy, justified by a desire to minimize risk while still getting > > things done. > > > well, that's just stupid. It is, and it's not. No company has infinite resources, and you have to do the best with what you have. This is mostly a case of, "keep the old stuff alive while we focus our efforts on replacing it with newer, shinier stuff," at least where I'm at. > > Over time, this has led to software that has become extremely fragile > > and nearly impossible to change. > > > of course it has. > > kind of reminds me of mutt, actually. ;) Well, that's sort of my point. ;-) -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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