On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 2:41 PM, Phil Christensen <p...@bubblehouse.org> wrote: > > I think that's debatable. Mozilla was terrible for a long time, there just > wasn't much alternative. You could make the (arguable) point that Mozilla's > rewrite happened at the cost of disengaging from the web community, leading > people to jump ship to IE. > I agree that the process wasn't smooth, easy and done in a best possible way. But the point was that the net result is positive. Would "Mozilla Platform" be possible _now_ without such a rewrite?
> > I don't think Apache is a particularly good example of why ground-up rewrites > are more reasonable in open source projects. It took **years** to get a > critical mass on Apache 2, and there are still many plugins that don't > support anything but prefork mode. > I meant here the transition from 0.7.x to 0.8.8 (Shambhala). They designed it completely from scratch in _parallel_ with developing the 0.7.x series. And this was a foundation of the following 1.x success (modular design etc.) > >> And what about CVS that couldn't/refused rewrite from >> scratch and peacefully evolves adding features little by little? Can it >> catch up with svn/git/bzr/hg? I doubt so. CVS's example in fact says that >> if you refuse to do it then someone else will do and will replace you. > > Well, again, debatable. OpenBSD still uses CVS, and has started a significant > push to patch and upgrade the existing CVS source. > With all due respect to OpenBSD developers, they are just a tiny part of the all VCS users and their significant push in their relatively small community will not magically save CVS I'm afraid. The point here is that once a dominant VCS in the world, CVS now looses its position pretty fast and all these incremental improvements (commitid etc.) can not save it. It is too late now. The part of the lesson here is that the code is/was in such a shape that the implementation of urgently needed features (like commit atomicity) took so long that others (svn/git/bzr/hg etc.) implemented everything from scratch and even more. See for example of VCS usage trends http://tinyurl.com/ykmurn7 and http://tinyurl.com/qj7c3 >> May be it is open source that makes it different, may be people think >> more about fun and beauty than about money in this case? >> It is not so simple and Joel's hypothesis is far from being 100% true IMHO. >> In the end a lot of people know/use Borland's, Netscape's and Microsoft's >> software but how many know/use Joel's? ;) > > I think it's far simpler than that. There's an old expression that sums it > up: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. > > Taking limited resources from a nearly-complete and reasonably popular > project to add them to a brand-new and **backwards-incompatible** project is > rarely ever a wise project management decision. > That is all true but it is very close to Joel's reasoning, kind of a manager's point of view. It is too business/money oriented and doesn't exhaust all the reasons why people write software in open source world in particular. And what is more important it doesn't explain why they still rewrite it from scratch sometimes and succeed? ;) But this became completely unrelated to this list, sorry for dragging discussion so far. -- Mikhail Terekhov _______________________________________________ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
