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  • From: Jens Laas <jens.laas AT data.slu.se>
  • To: Andrew Stitt <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] feature creep. WAS: splitting cvs spells
  • Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:55:58 +0200 (CEST)

(06.10.09 kl.08:42) Andrew Stitt skrev följande till
sm-discuss AT lists.ibibl...:

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 understand and agree, to a point. Every time something is moved into a function, you increase the level of indirection. If you know the interface of the function this will be a simplification. If you do not know the interface this increases the time to understand. You have to hunt down the implementation of the function and read what it does.

So for developers moving stuff to libraries is a good thing, and a simplification. Not necessarily for users.

BUT without developers we have no users :-).


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".

True. You do a great job with this. Sometimes its ok to leave it up to the human to fix it though.



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?

No. A thought though: maybe we could separate the basic build and the separate advanced logic that does the "smart" build. The basic build
should work by itself if every dependency (explicit or implicit) is met.

This was really ment more as a reality check and food for thought.

Thanks again for out preferred server OS!
Cheers,
Jens



-Andrew


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| Andrew D. Stitt | acedit at armory.com | astitt at sourcemage.org |
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