On Wed, 04 Oct 2006 15:44:24 +0200
Luca Longinotti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> TreeCleaners, to an extent Security etc. _do_ remove what is dead,
> what has reached points of unmaintainability and brokenness that
> cannot be anymore supported. The rest still is there because it works
> (so why remove it?), or because it has someone that keeps it alive
> (so why remove it?). If there's something to do here, it's kicking
> out old, broken stuff etc. faster and improving QA (as Kevin already
> pointed out), definitely not making it so difficult to add new stuff
> that no one will, that only produces stagnation of the tree in the
> end.
Maybe we could all move toward a more productive use of this metaphor
of an actual tree.
Stuff lives in trees, birds nest there, leaves grow, twigs spring,
branches, er branch off, dead leaves fall to the ground, new leaves
bud, buds even bud, all kinds of stuff goes on throughout the life of a
tree, yet I have really never come across a tree that "stagnates". It
just isn't something that trees get up to. Maybe it's only when birds
start getting territorial about stuff (official maintainership through
metadata during longe leaves of absence, wanting to stop some kinds of
birds nesting, forbidding new suns to grow toward) that the tree starts
looking ugly and useless and perhaps might starve.
This tree is rooted in an openly available and usable plenty of soil. It
is this "software"'s use to the tree as well as the tree's use to the
software that keeps the tree alive, and there is an entire ecosystem
that revolves around keeping itself alive, with a vivid interest in
keeping even this tree. Us devs are perhaps the tiny ants that milk the
plant lice that live on the leaves of our tree. We may not always see
the whole of the tree and the height and breadth it reaches, seeing as
we are climbing the branches far from the furthest reaches of twigs and
roots , but we do continously work to clean up our tree and make it
more useful to at least ourselves, helping many others as we go along
to find their way among the many branches, and see better horizons.
Kind regards,
JeR
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