Bertrand - I think I understand what you're saying -- if we wait until everything is "just right" before releasing, we'll delay release significantly, and that will be a disservice to our users.
I guess what we're really discussing is not a binary question, but where is the optimum balance between user friendliness and timeliness. My concern is that if we release before Tika is more user friendly, that users would need to expend more effort to understand it, and that would decrease their experimentation, and ultimately, acceptance. First impressions are powerful. Let's take as an example Chris' great feature of turning on or off byte array MIME type detection. If I'm not mistaken, overriding the default setting now requires creation of a new XML file (since using the default settings does not require creation of, or even knowledge of, such a file). I suppose even that is ok for a 0.1 release, but here's another thing. I was having problems using this feature. I looked through the code, and could not see where the byte array MIME type detection was being used. If there had been a minimal test exercising the feature I could have run it, stepped through it, or just looked at it and been sure that it was me and not Tika that needed correction. After some review of the code, I came to the conclusion that it was only used where the user passes the byte header him/herself; I was thinking that one of our utilities would have read the header. If others with no familiarity with Tika internals will find it even more difficult to figure this kind of stuff out, then working with Tika may be frustrating for them. There have been many times when I have explored a new piece of software, and the amount of effort to understand it and get it to work exceeded my patience. I wouldn't want this to happen with Tika. I don't mean this in any way as a criticism to anyone. You are very generously giving your personal time and expertise to this code, and I truly appreciate it. My point was to elevate the importance of user friendliness in our release criteria. I would like to be helpful in this area, creating unit tests, providing documentation, etc. - Keith -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/0.1-release--tf4611474.html#a13201702 Sent from the Apache Tika - Development mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
