FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: Windows Vista Performance Kludges (that Haiku does

["Ryan Leavengood" <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 12/13/06, Simon Taylor <simontaylor1@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I do feel Haiku needs some more formal way of preventing bloat. At the moment 
> it is
> safeguarded by the people who have SVN access having the "right idea". In future
> though, Haiku is likely to be swamped with contributions from people from Linux
> backgrounds adding the particular features they feel they couldn't live 
> without, and I think
> Haiku needs a way of dealing with that. Honestly I think we will have a fight 
> on our hands
> to prevent the Haiku user experience tending towards that of Linux - the only 
> reason I'm
> still following Haiku is I believe it's one we can win.
I think this is an extremely important point and more or less
summarizes well why I started this email thread. Haiku can achieve
this ideal, but it will require vigilance.

For example, today I committed some code that will result in two new
default Tracker add-ons (making a total of four so far.) I was
somewhat hesitant to add these, but their simplicity and need (in my
mind) caused me to go ahead and add them. Of course if others decided
the system would be better off without them I wouldn't fight too much
(we have BeBits after all), but I think here we are OK. Still it can
be a slippery slope and before we know it we have 10 default Tracker
add-ons (to continue the example at hand.)

As for the future deluge of contributors, I think it would be useful
to continue the trend of limiting SVN commit access until someone has
proven that they deserve it. As I found out today it is easy to make a
mistake which hurts the repository (though most are fairly easy to
fix.) But the biggest threat is the feature-bloat we are talking
about.

Regards,
Ryan