On Gnucash, G2, and Architecture

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 11:39:08AM -0400, Josh Sled wrote:
> 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.

Good point.  Users will be annoyed if GC becomes more difficult to
install.

> 
> 
> > 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.

I agree that they're both important and I agree that a larger
user-base leads to more *potential* developers.  However, I think that
the number of developers that successfully grok the code-base and make
non-trivial contributions, is NOT LINEARLY CORRELATED with the number
of would-be users-turned-dev who check-out the CVS to see if they can
scratch their itch.  Therefore, I don't believe releasing g2 will
increase devs of the first type.  Instead, I believe the number of
would-be users-turned-dev who become contributing devs is directly
correlated with the ease of grokking the code-base.


Basically I'm saying: what's the problem with GC now?  It's not lack
of popularity; it's not lack of users; it's not absence from distros.
It's lack of devs, which is, I believe, caused by the complexity of
the code-base.  Releasing G2 would be great, but after releasing G2,
the answer to the question "Ok, what's the problem with GC, *now*?"
would be exactly the same.  And so would the solution.

> 
> 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.

Just FTR, I think new features are pretty low on the priority list.

-chris