kdenetwork/kmail

[Ingo Klöcker]

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On Thursday 19 September 2002 01:46, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> i don't think that was what he was saying. kmail's devel has been
> conservative to keep stability high while adding some fundamental
> features (such as IMAP). on the up-side, this has created a nice,
> stable piece of software that works well for many.
>
> but life has trade-offs, and in this case the trade-offs include a
> pattern of development that is at times excruciatingly slow and
> overbearingly dominated by a select few individuals. patches have
> been ignored,

How many? Three? Four? So many?

> needed features are slow to arrive,

Because except a few core-developers nobody added new features. Now, all 
of a sudden a whole lot of developers came out of nowhere and add one 
feature after the other to the make_it_cool branch. I really wonder 
where those people where the last few months.

> contributors have been discouraged,

Maybe a few. Others haven't been discouraged.

> and it has resulted in a body of code that is in
> serious need of refactoring.

This has nothing to do with cautious development. If the development had 
been faster then refactoring would have been necessary earlier. BTW, 
some of us where always of the opinion that refactoring was necessary. 
But we simply didn't have the people and the time for such a task (some 
small things where nevertheless already refactored). I'm glad that 
there are now some people who obviously have enough time for this.

> while make_it_cool is atempting to address these challenges, it
> doesn't mean that the kmail in HEAD is a steaming pile of shit, just
> that perhaps it is the right time for development to take a different
> path. in this case that means a slightly more cavalier attitude
> towards short-term stability in order to tune the entire code base
> for current and future needs.

What's happening currently in make_it_cool is a good thing. But I wished 
it would have been started after the release of KDE 3.1 so that those 
who now hack on the make_it_cool branch could have helped us to get 
KMail ready for KDE 3.1. But I guess they wouldn't have helped us 
anyway because bug fixing is so boring.

> perhaps when this is done it will be time again to return to a more
> conservative approach.

We'll see.

Regards,
Ingo

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