[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Development Strategies

[Andrew Sutton <ansutton@xxxxxxx>]

On Monday 03 December 2001 03:24 pm, Per I. Mathisen wrote:
> I'm sceptical of a full rewrite of everything. It is a bit too massive
> effort for one person, and design by commitee doesn't work for open
> source. I'm afraid all that talk is going to melt into thin vapour. I
> think there are some people here (not naming names!) who are taking their
> CS classes too seriously. Head over to KernelTrap and read Linus on
> software development instead :)
> (http://www.kerneltrap.org/article.php?sid=398&mode=thread&order=0)

why not modernize? it can't hurt, but you're right... it is an overwhelmingly 
large project for which i won't have as much time as i'd like. the fact is 
that the code isn't meant to be extended. adding the capability for extension 
is going to take massive rewrites of a couple subsystems and then you'll have 
to change all the code to accomodate the changes. it's not _that_ bad of an 
idea if more than a couple people are willing to carry the burden.

by the way. they don't just teach software engineering in school and some of 
us take our _jobs_ seriously because we've been out of school for a couple 
years and realize that things are done differently. this IS what i do. i 
design software to be implemented by myself and others - and given enough 
information on what i'm working, i'm good at it.

i don't know what it is about open source that's so self righteous. there's 
alot of stuff that people do WRONG and could learn from a proprietary 
software houses - linux included. it just *happens* to work for linux because 
there are essentially full time maintainers. so don't wave this open source 
flag and tell me that i don't know what i'm talking about or that i take 
"classes" too seriously. maybe the real problem is that some people don't 
take development seriously enough to understand the need for this stuff.

you know, i used to consider myself a hacker, just like lots and lots of open 
source developers. now i'm proud to say that i'm a product of the corporate 
process and thank god i'm not a hacker. now i just think its sad that 
somebody can write software for a living and defend the idea that you don't 
need a process for a large project. sad.

> Oh, and if _I_ were to rewrite something, I'd go for an SDL+OpenGL client
> with libuta and various SDL support libraries (PNG,mixer,etc)...
> wooohooo, now we're talkin'!.... instantly multiplatform, even!

i read somewhere that Qt was pulling SDL in as a device to paint on, but i 
never saw anything after that. Qt already does OpenGL, so that's nice.

andy