John Check wrote: > On Thursday 12 August 2004 03:34 pm, Erik Steffl wrote: > >>John Check wrote: >>... >>>One act gigging with this stuff is worth a dozen coders when it comes to >>>legitimizing the platform. There's so much potential with what's here >>>today that it blows my mind, but if it's "by geeks, for geeks" it really >>>limits were >> >> not that long ago it wasn't even that. The sound/audio/music software >>in linux is improving rapidly. obviously, you get the by geeks for geeks >>stuff first because it cannot be any other way - it takes time to make >>the program stable enough to be usable by general public. > > > Yup. There's a definite progression. I'm not unfamiliar with development > cycles, as far as does it _have_ to be that way, it's a debatable point. not really, you will always have nothing, then something incomplete sort of usable and only after that there's something usable (if you're lucky:-) developer could opt to not release unfinished stuff but then how would he get requirements? ... > There's is a tendency though, for free software developers to put some things > off because "We'll make it right for 1.0". Which in itself is good, but we > have a quality obsession (which is also good) whereby a 1.0 release really > means something, unlike commercial software. > The upshot of this is as the code matures, decisions that were made early on > become hairier and hairier to address. Ironically, this can lead to massive > redesign and rewrites which pretty much wipes out most of the accumulated > documentation in terms of accuracy. I don't remember a project (hobby or commercial) that would not go through major design changes. This is true for major project (with all the docs that osi 9000 (or whatever it is for software) requires) all the way to small (but non-trivial) scripts. It is a problem but I don't think there is a way out, it's kinda like there's no perpetuum mobile, you always loose some energy (=docs always lag, requirements change, bugs are found etc.) OTOH I guess now is a good time to focus on usability since the tools are on the verge of actually working (for general public, i.e. non programmers, non sysadmins) I just find it somewhat not entirely appropriate to make it sound as if developers were ignoring users/documentation/user-interface etc. That's the whole mindset that I see expressed fairly often, don't mean to accuse you of accusing developers, actually your email was quite reasonable (so I am, to some extent, using your email as a vehicle to rant a bit:-) erik
