Robert Kaiser wrote:
Right, it is. And even maintaining al bunch of code you don't really
know and which is sometimes written in strange ways is a quite hard job,
have you ever tried that?
Unfortunately yes. And I looked at SM code briefly and decided it was the mutant
offspring of people who met, drunk, at a masquerade ball. I have worked on
projects where some programmers "marched to a different drummer," but some of
the authors heard a whole other brass band.
Don't take that as criticism, it's my honest comment on the mismatch in code
styles, not the competence of the authors as individuals. You have my sympathy,
but I'm never going to work on code like that again. I applaud your courage to
work on code from so many origins.
The SeaMonkey project mostly consists of people who have never worked on
many parts of the code that the old suite had, most of us worked only in
user interface ("frontend") parts and never in the platform code
("backend") those interfaces build on, so we are simply unable to
maintain it.
Our only chance of keeping SeaMonkey alive at all was to reduce the
amount of unknown code we cannot maintain and replace it with code that
is being maintained by someone else - which meant switching to the newer
Mozilla platform, of which e.g. the new form management code is a part of.
If I may say, what is there is more "field management" than form management,
because what is needed is to be able to save the entire form (values) as a named
whole, not the values of the fields, requiring the user to go and change each
field. So I can have *sets* of data to plug into a given form.
Now, that we have switched to that base and can let the old stuff die,
we can look into ways to improve the newly acquired things and those
parts of code that we have in the application now and should be able to
maintain.
If I might offer a suggestion, if there was better documentation on writing
extensions, the interfaces available to be used, some of these problems might be
solved by people who have a need. just my thought.
--
Bill Davidsen <[email protected]>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
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