The future of Morphic (Was Re: Shrinking sucks!)

Yanni Chiu yanni at rogers.com
Mon Feb 7 22:01:48 UTC 2005


Juan Vuletich wrote:
> 
> I heartfully agree with Cees aproach. Back compatibility is a pain in
> the butt. Let's keep maintainig what people actually uses, and let's
> start leaving behind stuff that is old, buggy, unmaintained, incomplete,
> unused, etc.

I think this is where TFNR is getting off on the wrong foot.
The "stakeout" of the image makes the assumption that everything
in the image has somebody who wants it, and somebody who wants
to own it. Consider that in some cases the original authors
know it was experimental code and have now abandoned it.
How likely is it that an owner is going to be found,
who spends enough time to learn that the code should
be killed off?

This cruft is burdening the entire strategy, presenting
a barrier that is sufficient to prevent enough momentum
build up (from enough developers joining).

IMHO, a strategy that chooses an image and grows it, is
more likely to gather steam than one that tries to break
up the existing monolith. If a developer joins the break
up movement, then it's almost certain that he'd have to
poke around into strange corners of the image that are
of little interest to him. OTH, joining a grow it movement
means learning about a slim image and chasing down missing
pieces of the functionality that the developer has signed
on for. Going against the normal developer inclinations
is going to keep people from signing on.

--yanni




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