Am Freitag, 13. April 2007 21:38 schrieb Abdelrazak Younes: > Georg Baum wrote: > > >> I don't share your pessimism, especially > >> if we are to compare current SVN with the state of 1.4.0 when it was > >> released. > > > > That is not a good comparison. 1.4.0 should not have been released in that > > state, otherwise we would not have users still using 1.3. > > Switching or not to 1.4 has *nothing* to do with the stability of 1.4.0.
Yes, not of 1.4.0 anymore, but of current 1.4svn. And that does still suffer from a too early released 1.4.0. It still has crashes and other problems like the one with the toolbar, but they can't be fixed without major surgery which is not advisable in a stable branch. > Users switched when they see something that fits the bill. The main > problem of the 1.4 series is speed and I reckon this is mostly solved in > 1.5. The only drawback of the poor stability of 1.4.0 is that users that > were willing to switch have just waited for 1.4.1 or 1.4.2. And you know > what? That's a very sane behaviour. Of course (I even waited until 1.4.4 before I switched the default from 1.3.x to 1.4.x at work), but that does not say something about the general quality of the 1.4 branch. > > If we don't > > regain the stability of 1.3 with 1.5.0 we will probably never recover from > > the lost reputation. > > Do you really believe that? I fear it. > Just look at the traffic on the user list. > There is no such thing as a "lost reputation" in an open source project. Of course there is. But you can't see that from the mailing list of a project, because most people who think it is crap simply ignore it and use something else. In the case of LyX you can find from time to time a discussion in comp.text.tex of the german version that might give some insight. Another example of "lost reputation" is a discussion we had with H.P. Gumm around the release of 1.4.0, this was about speed and a math regression concerning xymatrix. > > Another reason is that several people are discussing (and changing) > > fundamental design principles of LyX > > Are you kidding me? "fundamental design principles" and "LyX" do not fit > very well together... I hope this was friday speak, otherwise you just insulted several developers (not me, but if you look at the lfun mechanism at least Jean-Marc and Angus). > > (e.g. the separation of frontend - > > kernel via the lfun machinery), or doing some 'cleanup'. Now is definitely > > not the time to even think about either of that. > > Or political discussions like the place of debug.h. This eats a lot of time > > with no outcome. > > You are free to ignore the message, you are even free to _not_ read the > messages. I can't understand in which way this is eating your time. Not mine, but that of others: I was rather thinking of "project time". > My time is mine and I believe that there is some outcome to interested > developers: they actually benefits from the explanations given in these > discussions. There is a life after 1.5.0. Sure, but then the current discussions are forgotten, and if you want to use some results you have to revive them (because some people who don't participate now because of the timing would have a strong opinion later). > Please Georg, try to restrain yourself from giving lessons. I only asked > for a list of bugs. Such is life: You don't always get exactly what you ask for. Don't worry, I will not try to convince anybody to share my opinion, but please allow me to state it. > PS: for newcomers (mainly Richard and Bernhard), don't be shocked by the > tone used here. This is about an old tradition which Georg is probably > trying to relaunch (at least I hope that's the case). It's called the > "no smiley" friday. No, this was not the case. I tried to explain why I think that 1.5.0 is not ready yet, and I don't think that I used a friday tone. If you are referring to the part where I wrote that some bug was introduced by you: That was no accusation at all, it is normal that people who work a lot on the code introduce bugs, so please don't take this personally, I know that you are careful and are devoting a lot of time to fix bugs introduced by others. Georg
