On Fri, 19 Sep 2008, Karl Glazebrook wrote:
> Hi Hugh > > We all have reasons why we can't. I don't think Craig was singling you out in No, I didn't feel it was a personal matter, that's OK. > particular, just making a comment that any serious new developments in PDL > require fresh new developers with time and energy. It may in fact be This is true. > impossible, for the reasons you state and maybe the gurus will gradually make > incremental improvements. I don't think one can expect the existing gurus to Yes, I accept that is the case, and I have no expectation that people will jump to do what I wish for. I contribute to other things, and know this. :-) > have the time to make big changes just because they have the expertise and are > thought to be responsible for PDL. > > One thing that is easy is to at least patch the docs. Not enough of us do > this. So I asked what/where the source for the docs lives. I'll happily patch that if I can handle the format. I browsed to here http://pdl.cvs.sourceforge.net/pdl/WWW/documentation/html/ and it's empty. No, my frustration is that I know already this is Free Software (and this is a point that applies to all such software), and one is therefore free to enhance it. What is beginning to grate, and again this is not personal, is the assumption that because one is able to enhance it, everyone who raises a problem is expected to fix it themselves. This is a cultural problem with the Free Software movement, in my opinion. I think it needs to be aired, because I think it puts people off. Also, any problem that will make work for developers gets beaten to death before it can cause such trouble. :-) The users, who usually (hopefully, if we want free software to REALLY take off) outnumber the developers, aren't given the same clout. I don't have a solution to this at present, and I understand how this has come about, and the constraints that maintain this ("someone has to write this stuff", "It's in our spare time", etc.), I just hope to get a few people who are brighter than me thinking about it. We have people writing about philosophy and ethics in the Free Software movement, this should be something we can address. In the case of Perldl, more of the users are programmers, than for say, Blender, but it doesn't mean they are free to commit to the work. > > Karl Thank you, Hugh > > > On 19/09/2008, at 7:52 AM, Hugh Sasse wrote: > > > > > > > > As to (1): > > > > Short form: > > I'm sorry, that is not going to happen, for various sensible > > reasons. > > > > Long form: > > > > "Not that hard": no, just requiring decent familiarity with the > > code base which takes time to pick up. Why don't programmers > > like maintenance programming? Because understanding other > > people's code is more difficult that writing your own. I'm > > clearly not in a position to do anything useful if I'm running > > into problems like this. > > > > It's not like I don't contribute to projects I use, I have > > recently sent off a number of patches to various Ruby projects, > > for example, and in the past to various others I could name. > > These days I'm more fluent in Ruby than Perl, so my contributions > > wold probably be less useful anyway. And I have other things > > that I'm trying to get done so don't have enough time. There are > > plenty of valid reasons for not being a contributor to any given > > project, and I'm afraid I can't contribute to everything. So > > this line of reasoning is beginning to wear pretty thin. Adding > > more programmers to a project has been shown to slow it down in > > enough cases for it to be significant [Brooks, "The Mythical Man > > Month"], so sometimes diving in can be a hindrance, especially > > with code which doesn't fit the existing structures, due to > > insufficient familiarity with the code base. > > > > Thank you, > > Hugh > > _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
