Re: More Political Stuff

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On 25 Aug 2000, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> > I'm curious to hear what has been rushed, in your opinion.  
> 
> In a few years, an awesome desktop has been put together.  So many
> features, libraries, etc. have been created for an excellent desktop and
> development.  But a lot of the flaws I see, a lot of the design issues
> that we are reworking (replacing gmc, goad, etc.) I feel like it was
> rushed, and we might not have to be replacing so much right now but
> instead developing a rock-solid system.  Instead we're spending a lot of
> time right now fixing a lot of old design flaws, replacing them with
> better architectures that would allow us to make REALLY nifty stuff in a
> year or so... but if we had slowed down a tad bit, and not made of the
> design flaws we had, perhaps we could have been doing the nifty stuff in
> only a month or two... sort of.. see my point?  Now that i've woken up I
> think I've lost it...

You're on crack. :)

The reason things like GOAD and GMC are getting replaced is not because
they were rushed initially, but because we now have the experience to know
better.

For example, GOAD definitely wasn't rushed, but there is NO way I could
have ever hoped to make OAF suck as little as it does without having
endured a year of GOAD's limitations. I'm sure in a year or two, OAF will
need replacing or revamping with an even better solution (I already know
of a possible problem or two that has caught my eye).

At the time, GMC seemed like a very good idea - we would get to reuse code
from mc and build a nice file manager - but we learned about the other
problems once things were in a working state.

The problem is not that things were rushed, but that it is impossible to
produce a perfect design without infinite experience, and humans are
neither perfect nor infinite.
-- Elliot
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