kdenetwork/kmail

[Aaron J. Seigo]

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On Wednesday 18 September 2002 06:47, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> > 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?

does it matter?

> > 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.

this predates the make_it_cool branch by some margin of time.

> > contributors have been discouraged,
>
> Maybe a few. Others haven't been discouraged.

thankfully... kmail has progressed to this point thanks to those hardy souls.

> > 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,

in this case "cautious" is a euphamism for "anal and undesirous of change". i 
was being nice =)

> 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.

indeed.... and the future is what matters...

> 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.

i agree it would have been better post-3.1, but i don't think it has to do 
with bug fixing being boring. i think it has to do with getting involved with 
a project that you can do more than just fix bugs and deal with struggling to 
get patches accepted. when people feel like stakeholders in a project, they 
will put more effort into even the drudgerous parts. "stakeholder" isn't how 
i'd describe my relationship to kmail in HEAD, and i've contributed a few 
patches.

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

yes ..  =)

- -- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"
    - Albert Einstein
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