Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Juuso Alasuutari <iuso AT sourcemage.org>]

On Wednesday 03 January 2007 04:48, Eric Sandall wrote:
> Quoting Alexander Tsamutali <astsmtl AT gmail.com>:
<snip>
> > I mean for each task or set of tasks we can choose 1-3 _best_ software
> > packages, make good spells, test them, release them and finally
> > support them.
> > For everything else we can create special, community maintained
> > "extras" grimoire, similar to arch's AUR [0]
> >
> > So what do you think about it? If someone has another proposals on
> > this topic pleae post it here, we need it!
> >
> > [0] http://aur.archlinux.org/
>
> IMO that's not fixing the problem, but rather moving it out of site.
> We'll still have those bugs, just in grimoire "xyz' rather than the
> 'main' grimoire. I don't see splitting up the grimoires any further as
> being productive, but rather time should be spent on fixing the
> current bugs (we've had close to this many bugs before and brought it
> down in a short while) rather than finding ways to make our count look
> smaller, while still remaining the same.
>
> Keep in mind that splitting the grimoires will add more of a headache
> to having global files (e.g. KDE_DEPENDS), keeping those files in
> sync, integrating between grimoires, and cross-grimoire dependencies.

I am rather fond of Grand Solutions and have had little time to fix bugs 
lately, so I feel somewhat hypocritical voicing an opinion like this. But I 
think this all boils down to unpleasantness. I don't think splitting the main 
grimoire into parts is a solution rather than a creative attempt to 
circumvent some harsh realities.

Ridding Bugzilla of entries like "an obscure spell that only I use fails to 
compile" isn't fun, it's boring and might feel more frustrating than working 
on some larger scheme. This unpleasantness is what the mind wants to fight, 
and thus it very much enjoys talking and dreaming about Hot New Stuff.

But let's face it, there's absolutely nothing else wrong with stable than 
buggyness. Some of our best practices may not be the best possible ones, but 
that's not stopping anyone from fixing bugs.

What I don't want to say is that Alexander or anyone else should stop 
dreaming 
of Hot New Stuff, nor that those dreams should not be spoken of. All I'm 
saying is that it's often a bit too tempting in times like these. And it 
seems more common among the fresh recruits, too -- I've only been around for 
about a year, and I've come up with my share of Big Ideas. Most of them were 
crap, but some have actually caught on.

-- 
        Juuso Alasuutari
[[ Source Mage GNU/Linux ]]

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