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  • From: Andrew Stitt <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] feature creep. WAS: splitting cvs spells
  • Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 08:42:16 -0700

On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 01:36:08PM +0200, Jens Laas wrote:
>
> Hello!
>
> I fear feature creep and increased complexity in SMGL.
>
> To start with I appreciate all the good work you developers (and others!)
> do for SMGL.
>
> But my main attraction to SMGL was the ease for the admin to casually view
> and _understand_ the spells. Increasingly functionality has moved out of
> the spells and into library functions, thus decreasing understandability.
>
> Its easier to fix something simple when it breaks than fixing something
> complex. And things do inevitably break.
>
> So, in short, simplicity is a virtue. Atleast for me.
>

Well, Ironically the main reason to move stuff to libraries is to
simplify spells.

I agree with you in general on the virtues of simplicity. However I have
to point out that the environment itself (source based compiling)
is complex by nature. So some complexity is arguably unavoidable,
and thus some feature work is necessary to "make stuff work".

The challenge is to identify whats really necessary, and to make the
interface to that both simple and general enough to be re-usable later
for other problems.

The real dichotomy seems to be "necessary" features vs "cause it'd be
cool" features. Can you be more specific on where you draw that line?


-Andrew


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