[theforum] Decision time - please cast your vote before noonSaturday Nov 20th (12.00GMT)

Martin Paul Burns martin.burns at uk.ibm.com
Wed Nov 17 14:21:44 CST 2004





Morgan wrote on 17/11/2004 17:45:51:

> haven't past rewrites involved designated "teams" with leaders that had
> "todo lists" who then passed out the work to the wonderfully willing?

Nope. And it's not a valid comparison.

1) Previous rewrites have been deep coding a completely bespoke system,
rather than on a modular framework application where the focus is on light
customisation

2) Previous rewrites have been along the lines of "Bunch of folk get
together without a *great* deal of pre-setting of requirements by evolt"
even though the participants may have planned a lot. Generally it's seemed
to those of us outwith the codefest that cool stuff just emerged.

Actually I remember one of the last codefests where there was even a strong
refusal to even tell the rest of us *who the participants were* beyond
names...

> why is this any different?

See (1) above.

> i don't think anyone really cares (i dare say jeff included) what
> platform/system/language evolt runs on as long as we duplicate the
existing
> functionality.

Please see the 'suits you sir' thread: we have already accepted that we may
lose some functionality for the greater future benefit of a framework
where:
1) We are not the only developers
2) There are 3rd party modules to hand
3) We're only working on the top 10% of the system.

That discussion is dead, gone, and decided.

> jeff is charging us $50 a month? i think?

We're also paying $100/month for a server that's sitting doing nothing.

> can't we afford that until a new site is *ready*?

Where 'ready' is in theforum's opinion good enough to launch. This doesn't
mean every last tiny thing that we have now. It certainly doesn't mean
keystroke duplication. And it doesn't mean limiting ourselves to what's
there now if we can just add a module that does cool stuff.

> i think we can all see that evolt will *work* in drupal, but as jeff
pointed
> out there is a huge amount of tweaking to be done, and we all kow that
takes
> a lot of time.

Yes there's tweaking to be done. But think of a few things:

1) The majority of existing functionality was put together in a few
weekends. We have 4 weeks. The hard bits are done.

2) Unless we have an impetus to do the tweaking, inertia will reign as it
has done for the last few years. Moving to Jeff's system was supposed to be
a short term thing. What, 2 years ago nearly?

3) Going out with a bit of cruftiness would actually be a useful spur, not
only to our current coding hotshots, but to all the others out there in
evoltland that *could* contribute. We could use it as a "You think this
could be better. Yes. Now come and *help*" - we could gain a whole new raft
of volunteers who *can* come and work on it. And gain community involvement
in the requirements setting, rather than presenting a fait accompli. Would
you swap site perfection for a revitalised community? I know I would.

4) Redesigning in public is fun, exposing the process - are we really
saying we're so much better than Zeldman who does so regularly?


Cheers
Martin



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