On Gnucash, G2, and Architecture

[Josh Sled]

On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 11:18 -0400, Chris Shoemaker wrote:

> If it only works as well as 1.x, why are users going to be any more
> pleased with g2 than 1.x?  Do you think the average user knows and
> cares what libraries their acct package uses?

No, but they do care that they can package-management-install it and get
it up and running in a spare evening.  That capability is being
threatened.


> I think that the survival of GC depends on maintaining (nay,
> *gaining*) *developers*.  A growing user-base is an incidental
> consequence of a high-quality program, which is determined by
> developer labor quantity and quality, which is a function of the
> condition of the code-base.

The best developers are those that are users, and decide to "upgrade" to
being devs ... either with a small patch or more active development
involvement.


> I'm sorry I can't tell you what you want to hear.  IMO, attracting
> devs is more important than releasing g2.  As for cause and effect,
> the former can cause the latter, but the latter will not help the
> former.

Attracting more devs is more important than releasing G2, but releasing
G2 will allow a larger user-base, which *will* attract more devs.
They're both important.

But with respect to "major architectural changes", the largest and
highest-value one to be made right now is dropping the gnome1
dependencies.  Moreover, since we've already started doing it, we should
_finish_ it before starting new projects to prevent cross-contamination.
More moreover, we *can* do another release without any new features, but
*not* without finishing the G2 port.

...jsled

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