[Kde-pim] Cleaning up obsolete features

[Kevin Ottens]

Hello,

Just to try to bring some light on the selection of such removal.

On Friday 31 July 2015 22:38:42 laurent Montel wrote:
> It was ask from user.

And you will get further requests for the craziest things. Having a user 
asking for something doesn't necessarily makes it valid to be implemented, 
otherwise you end up a Code Hoarder[*].
 
> It's unit tested.
> So why remove it ?

There's zero correlation between your premise and your question. If a feature 
is unit tested that doesn't make it a valid feature still.

We could imagine embedding an hex editor for emails in KMail. It could be 
nicely designed, fully unit tested... does it make it a valid feature for a 
mail client? Perhaps not. Implementing it and maintaining it for years might 
be a waste of time.

> I don't see why we need to remove feature which works ?

Because a feature that works doesn't necessarily brings value to users for 
several reasons. In particular because they'd have for instance poor usability 
or are simply unused because there's better alternatives out there, etc. So 
sometimes you want to trim down on the amount of features you have to put more 
care in the ones you keep: improve the cleanliness of their implementation, 
focus on having a better usability for them, etc.

Looks like we're entering such a cycle.

> How we will explain to user that we removed features ?

That's more a job for PR people, but there's several potential arguments 
there:
 1) we're modernizing and as such some of the most obscure and obsolete 
features can disappear;
 2) we're improving the usability and so we need to focus on the most 
important features so that they play along nicely and are properly presented 
(see above);
 3) go for the naked truth, we simply can't maintain all the cruft which got 
added over the years.

> I don't understand idea to remove feature which works ?

See above.

> If you want a light kmail perhaps you can create a new application based on
> kdepim component no ?

As Volker mentioned it's about maintenance burden, throwing even more code at 
the problem won't solve that.

Hoping that clarifies the motivations a bit.

Regards.

[*] http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2014/04/03/Code-Hoarders.html
-- 
Kévin Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net

KDAB - proud supporter of KDE, http://www.kdab.com
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