[theforum] movement for redesign

Madhu Menon webguru at vsnl.net
Mon Aug 11 23:12:39 CDT 2003


At 09:17 AM 12-08-03, Morgan Kelsey wrote:

>i'm also very familiar with jeff's style of programming, and can even
>impersonate him at parties.

Is that why he's been getting all that hate mail? ;)


> > That being said, I'm still very much in favor of multiple people being
> > in charge of all the critical points of evolt. Truly distributed
> > development in a community as large as ours is a holy grail.
>
>i agree, but i'm sure others do not.
>
>in reality, we're not talking about building a self-preserving spaceship to
>house the remnants of earth's civilization (though at times it sounds like
>it). evolt has a very good system now, i'm not sure involving a dozen more

Morgan, we also need to avoid the potential problems with reinventing the 
wheel and rewriting a system from scratch.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html

I hear the "OSS vs proprietary" debate here, but our CMS *is* actually open 
source, and has been for a while.

Jeff is going to make the latest changes publicly available in a day or 
two. Then anyone can go into the guts of the system and see what's wrong.

We have a bunch of people who can understand the code. So far I count:

* Morgan
* Judah
* Rudy
* Joshua

among just the people on this list.

(If we announced on thelist, we'd probably get a few more.)

It's ColdFusion code, not SomeEsotericLanguageCompilerIJustCreated version 0.8

As for the rest, MS SQL Server isn't a dying product, and Jeff migrated the 
code from Oracle in < 10 days.
Does it mean much that Postgre SQL code is open? Are we going to make 
changes in the db and create our own homecooked version?


>sets of hands will drastically improve things. if anything, a group of high
>caliber programmers is less productive than one or two who have been handed
>clear requirements.

+1. The more people you involve (especially when personal styles can vary 
widely), the more spaghetti code you're likely to get.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.


 From what I understand, the main issue is "Jeff is the only one who can 
make changes to the code. What if he's not around at some time?"

And I understand that. It's a valid point.

To me, that would be fixed by:

* Making the latest CMS code available for everyone to check out
* Routing changes through something like CVS and maintaining an always 
updated change log.
* Involving the other CF volunteers in the development process
* Routing some changes to these volunteers for them to implement
* Active peer review of code quality and consistency from time to time

>frankly, i'm a little puzzled why language and platform are always at the
>start of evolt rebuild discussions.

Different comfort levels of different people with different 
platforms/languages.

Regards,

Madhu



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