[PD-dev] a few questions

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 15 Apr 2004, Tim Blechmann wrote:

> but shouldn't we be able to solve this by _actively_ using
> source-forge's feature request / bug tracking system?

agreed. we first get the users to talk and _then_ we figure out who that
is addressed to... else it's too much "bureaucracy" for the user.

> i don't think it's very useful if miller and mathieu are working on
> their branches on their own (?) and a few guys adding code to the
> devel branch every time a new stable release comes up ...

Well, it is useful, but it's just not optimal. That might be a problem
firstly with how much activity is going on inside the devel branch, not a
problem of communication between devel guys and the community.

> the problem of pd being a work in progress is, that it should be both
> usable and being developed at the same time ...

that's an important principle of Extreme Programming (X-P)  
methodology... that the work is always in progress and ready to move
forward and ready to be used.

> mathieu, i don't know if this would work for what you are doing with
> impd, but for my taste it's better to have twice as much code and to
> be able to merge some of your changes to future "stable" releases ...

I really value tight code, I mean conceptually tight code, as they do in
the X-P methodology, because that's code that is more ready to move
forward (OnceAndOnlyOnce principle, aka DontRepeatYourself). And I think
that it's not going to be a factor of two in the end, more like a factor
of three or four, and that really weighs in the balance, because of
increased ability to make quick changes. (but even a factor of two _is_
quite significant; in this case anyway)

Now according to X-P what I'm doing is bad because the code is not ready
to use in the middle of my changes (and worse, for several weeks
straight), but the way I justify it is that the incremental redesign that
X-P mandates (to keep the code more ready to move forward) doesn't seem to
have been done quite enough with Pd, so I'm trying to catch up.

Being able to merge some of my changes with future "stable" releases isn't
a priority, from the moment people can access the Impd binaries. Of course
it would be nice if the devel branch would merge some of my changes, but
I'm not waiting for that because I could be waiting till 2006 and then it
would slow me down on many of my changes.

To me, patience is a virtue when it actually helps, not when it hinders;
maybe some devel folks would like to get my features for free, so my
patience would actually help them, but my IMpatience would help pretty
much everyone else instead, so... the choice is easy to do.

> just my 2.5 ¢ ... cheers...

oh my. that's after the inflation indexing? or is that after tax? times
are a-changing...

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                       http://artengine.ca/matju