Subject: the 1.0 vision (was Re: Scripting, formal docs and reliability)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Feb 02 2001 - 17:03:51 CST
At 12:16 AM 1/29/01 -0500, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>>Still we've gone a few steps beyond their vision for 1.0 in a number of
>>places :-)
Definitely. I chose the 1.0 feature set back in 1998 to draw a *minimum*
line in the sand -- all of the sneak-ins that've come in over and above that
line have been pure gravy.
>Yeah, esp. with regard to ports, stability, and file filters.
Uh, actually, you've got it backwards, Dom. :-)
If you could set your wayback machine to peek in on some of the early, early
Abi design discussions (circa the mighty 0.1 release), we were *very* aware
that the Open Source community was especially talented in the following areas:
- ports
- dialogs
- stability
- translations
- file formats
- nitty-gritty i18n issues
It's no accident that we put in APIs very early on for most of these, then
went ahead and started building the core stuff like editing, formatting, and
infinite undo. Ditto for the much-bemoaned string-passing APIs.
The vision always was to do some of the very hardest stuff, and minimize the
learning curve around the edges, to help maximize the ability of many, many
talented folks to start contributing.
Considering the size of the CREDITS file, the richness of high-quality
traffic on this list, and the volume of cool code flowing through Bonsai,
I'd say the vision for 1.0 was dead-on. :-)
Paul
motto -- Linus hacks the kernel, the world adds everything else
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