Subject: Re: more vs. better (was Re: morning hack...)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Apr 17 2001 - 15:39:14 CDT
At 11:22 AM 4/13/01 +0200, Joaquín Cuenca Abela wrote:
>Paul Rohr wrote:
>> There's no getting around the fact that *this* work still needs to be done,
>> one way or the other. I'd love to see us focusing our efforts on making
>> interesting subsets of the feature/UI/locale matrices *totally* green,
>> instead of adding more red and orange rows and columns.
>
>Agreed. I want to add that the 2 features in which I've been working
>started only to boostrap us to 1.0.
>I mean, the "macros" support born as "something to log user activity
>until a segfault".
>The "perl bindings" born as "something to bring us a test suite".
Absolutely. Those two developer-focused features are very, very useful, and
I don't want to stop your efforts to that end. I just want to stick to that
original goal of yours.
To be clear. There's a huge difference in time and effort between:
- a cool hack that's useful to developers
- a polished, rock-solid feature that Church Secretaries can rely on
The former can (and should) be an optional or debug-only feature in the
current sources, but I'd very much like to encourage everyone to resist the
temptation to delay 1.0 for the months it'd take to get the latter to Just
Work, regardless of how cool "just one more feature" would be.
A rock-solid implementation of the *existing* feature set sooner is much,
much, much more valuable than either of the following:
- N + 5 features that mostly work a few months from now, or
- N + 5 + ?? features that all Just Work a few years from now.
I just don't want to see our 1.0 release held up for any more new features,
no matter *how* cool. And yours does sound really, really cool. :-)
Paul
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