Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Why MUAs remain broken

[Jonathan Walther]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 05:57:10PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> While they may not really be "lazy and uncooperative", they certainly
> could fix their UI deficiency with not too much effort, and their
> failure to do so is undermining standards conformance, which is an
> important component of cooperation in a community like ours.

The Ximian coders are under incredible pressure to "produce" for the
money men backing their company.  So, one, they don't have the freedom
you would think to implement this; they have to prioritize the things
their backers say are important.  But two, in such an environment, the
joy goes away and it takes an incredible effort of will to focus ones
mind on such issues, when everyone around you is screaming "think of the
money! think of the money! no!  don't do that unless it will make us
MONEY!".  Even a one day hack will just never get done; the
psychological pressures prevent it.  And let us be honest; a 100 line
hack is lucky if it can be done and distributed properly to all the
appropriate parties in a single 8 hour work day.

> I think it is preferable to give people an incentive to fix
> deficiencies rather than rely on the much cheaper method of relying on
> standards-violating practices until somebody else contributes a patch.

Flames don't give people incentive to fix things; they give them
incentive to hate you and dismiss your complaints as "Unimportant, we
can't afford to support whiners".  A sad consequence of a struggling
economy and the need to make ends meet.  If socialism hadn't been proven
to be bunk, I'd be advocating it right now.

> I don't see why we should do it at all.  There must be dozens of
> Evolution developers, and hundreds of thousands of users.  They should
> fix their own software, not ask the rest of the world to violate
> perfectly good standards to suit their deficiencies, or come up with
> fixes to inconveniences that their users suffer from their UI.

The "rest of the world" is mostly standard breakers in this regard.  The
standard-keepers are few and far between, although extremely vocal.

> So here you have the problem that the RFC process is inherently
> conservative for standards where you only really start to see benefits
> when a significant fraction of the community implements them.

The RFC process isn't supposed to come up with existing standards; it is
supposed to document existing practice, and maybe make minor tweaks.

Jonathan

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