Is there anything *enjoyable* about our development process?

Josh Sled jsled at asynchronous.org
Fri Oct 14 20:51:12 EDT 2005


On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 16:13 -0400, Chris Shoemaker wrote:
> Yeah, who knows what those numbers mean.  But, there's a very
> noticable difference between a project that has a healthy development
> rate - even in maintenance mode - and one that doesn't.  And we don't.

That is very true.


> I agree that all those things are good goals, but how do we get there?
> There's a chicken-and-egg problem here.  All that "clean
> up/simplification" does reduce pain and it does feedback into more
> developers, but it takes work, which takes the developer time we don't
> have.

True.  It is also fun to some large degree, as well as enlightening.


> I guess that's the key of what I'm saying: I don't believe that making
> codebase simplification the #1 priority will achieve codebase
> simplification.  However, making "something else" the #1 priority
> *will* achieve codebase simplification incidentally.

Certainly we could set "simplicity" as a goal and either succeed or fail
at it. But it's not clear to me that setting a different goal will
necessarily incidentally make us achieve "simplicity".

FWIW, my goal in working with gnucash isn't 'fun', as such.  It's
primarily experience and knowledge.  If I want fun, there's better
places and projects for that, and I do them on the side.  But my goals
for gnucash are simplicity, stability and correctness.  I'd rather
gnucash be in the 200-year-software school [1] than the
200-active-contributors school.

[1] http://www.bricklin.com/200yearsoftware.htm


> > We've been
> > talking about switching over to svn on irc...
> 
> Who's "we" and how serious are "we"?  I'd be game for trying out
> whatever, but I was more intrigued by git and mercurial.

hampton, warlord and myself.  Serious, as we've all independently been
happy using subversion in other contexts.  It won't take too long, but
it too seems best waiting until g2 is out of the way.


> > ... but *NOTHING* else is as important, right now, as the G2 port and
> > next/first release thereof.
> 
> This must be some of that pressure Neil mentioned.  :) It sure will
> feel nice to finally say "proudly presenting, the long-awaited....."  :)

Yeah, and true.  We really need to get a release out for a variety of
reasons, and then focus on some actually-fun work doing some major
cleanups.  But all that stuff is necessarily destabilizing, so it
doesn't seem like a good idea to do it right now.

...jsled
-- 
http://asynchronous.org/ - `a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}`


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