[openbeos] Re: Developers Developers Developers was Re: Tracker icons

On Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:18:33 +0200 Helmar Rudolph <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
 said
> > All of which take a whole lot of time. And should be discussed in 
> > detail on GE. 
> > :-)
> 
> Where it leads to nowhere fast. Data migration and a 'no reply
> necessary' feature aren't difficult. Someone just needs to add them.

Short Answer - Find a developer to work on them.

Long Answer - By day I build 3 tier client server insurance systems.  I 
don't find them particularly interesting but I get paid a shirtload of 
money to do it.
By night I want to help out haiku and one of the things I am interested 
in is media so I wrote the quicktime reader and the mp4 reader.  One of 
them implements a feature of R1 and one of them is an extra feature.

Could I work on other things, probably.  Do I want to use my spare time 
to do things I am not interested in?  Unlikely sorry.

And this is the entire situation that Haiku is in.  The developers are 
doing it in their spare time and the focus is on getting R5 cloned as 
much as possible.  As a professional developer I know that feature 
creep can spell the end of a project and I applaud Michael for doing 
the hard work herding the cats in the right direction.

But nothing is really stopping you from getting things implemented.  
You just will not be able to point a finger at a developer and say 
"implement this feature for me now!".    You will have problems doing 
things that impact on other developers and the short answer there will 
be no for non R1 features.
But something like the No Reply Necessary feature could be done.  Grab 
the MDR source, work out what needs to be done, code it and submit a 
patch.  If the patch gets accepted then Haiku gets this feature.

> > So you think that if we told everyone "well, we won't have anything 
> > untill 2008 
> > or 2009, but it will be WAY cooler than what you have now" we would 
> > have some 
> > massive influx of new users?
> 
> No. But that wasn't the issue. The issue still is that GE - because
> of your intent - is not getting anywhere. There is no baton to hand
> over to R2 once R1 is done. You're sitting there with a forest or
> two. And while it's all loose and unstructured, you won't find
> resources available to do specific tasks. Catch 22.

GE was allways intended to be a repository of ideas.  

When Haiku is at a stage where the developers know for certain that a 
R1=R5+ release is ready, I have no doubt they will start to turn their 
minds to what else they want to have and the GE list will be looked at 
for ideas that developers will find interesting.

Cheers
David

--
Truth will be out this morning.  (Which may really mess things up.)

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