Just to add my take on that whole thread as well: Am Freitag, 14. Oktober 2005 19:53 schrieb Chris Shoemaker: > I recently came across (via /.) a brief 1-page article titled "-Ofun": > http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7996. I agree with the author's > thesis, which is that optimizing a project's development process for > the pleasure of developers leads to all sorts of good things.
Agreed on the main hypothesis, too. However, the described project means that the situation of the -Ofun perl6 compiler is not at all comparable to the gnucash project. Firstly, in the perl6 compiler project the developers are inherently also the users of the product. Secondly, in the compiler project the users are inherently also developers, or at least familiar to the way of how the developers will think. Both are definitly not the case in gnucash. In other words, the requirements and users' needs in the perl6 compiler are pretty much obvious to the developers. Not so in many aspects of gnucash. The fast feedback look that makes the perl6 compiler project so much -Ofun is simply not there in gnucash. We are happy enough when there is *any* feedback from real users -- feedback that we can understand and that we can use for code improvement, that is. Not to talk about the more difficult feedback loop in a GUI program as compared to a compiler, where you can specify test cases so much easier in the latter. > As applied to GnuCash, I would make a stronger assertion, though. I > believe that GnuCash's continued progress and relavence, absolutely > *depends* on a drastic revamping of the development process. No, I don't agree with that assertion. The development process in gnucash needs to be different than a compiler's development process because the whole project is different. And just to give a different voice here: I have soooooo much fun developing gnucash! My vision for gnucash has been and still is the "free manager for the personal finances, including the most modern online banking features, to make the private financial management as easy as possible". Of course that was limited to Germany, because only here we have the HBCI protocol which enables us to move *real* money from our very own source code. Every other day when I let gnucash connect to my bank, I think this is soooo cool. I had some success factors that made the HBCI parts especially fun for me to implement and maintain: The module structure in gnucash makes it possible that the HBCI stuff doesn't interfere with anyone who doesn't want to keep track of the HBCI library (now using aqbanking). The tasks of HBCI online banking consists of only a few relatively straightforward actions, which fit well (probably by coincidence) into the existing menu hooks. The engine has a clearly defined interface, where all the importing accessors and setters are clearly defined. So, yes: I have so much fun maintaining and improving the HBCI interface of gnucash, and I really enjoy this. And for the ever-lasting Scheme discussion: Before the gentle reader formulates another refutation about Scheme in general, he/she should please spend 15 minutes to read some introduction e.g. on http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/curriculum-Z-H-5.html (you can enter the Scheme expressions directly in "guile" as described e.g. here http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/guile-ref/Running-Guile-Interactively.html ) 15 Minutes. Really better spent than on yet another anti-whatever-Language flamewars. > If so, I'd like to start discussing what concrete things we can do to > improve the whole developement experience, considering ideas from the > article and elsewhere. > > E.g. Would a modern version-control system improve the development > experience? (It seems like several of the other recommedations in the > article depend on it.) Improvements are always good. A modern version control of course is better than the old cvs. Svn would make many different branches much more easier than CVS, although multiple branching would still work in CVS, iff people put up and do it. The question simply is: who does the transition work from cvs to e.g. svn? I can't; no time etc. Christian _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
