Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch 2.0 survey followup

[Talli Somekh]

> (snorts out of nose)  Sorry, I find that difficult to believe  
> without the name of the company.  (Looking *very* quickly over  
> Perforce's web page, it looks like ClearCase without dynamic views.)

fair enough. while i don't feel comfortable in betraying the name of  
the company, i will say that they were on the earliest and remain the  
largest adopters of FreeBSD for their entire system architecture,  
which happens to be among the most trafficked in the world.

furthermore, PostgreSQL also considered gnu arch but passed because  
of the lack of windows support.

> I will agree that if Tom wants to use Arch 2.0 to feed his family,  
> then Windows support is critical.
>
> I won't agree that Windows support is critical for GNU software.

there are so many GNU applications that are used in a windows  
environments, let alone proprietary unices, that i'm not sure what  
the target OS should be. that's not a criticism, only a comment has  
changed a great deal from its quite focused technical roots.

i suppose this echoes Andy and Tom's comments.

> Umm, sure, if that's what you think.

allow me to reveal that i'm not a hacker. i'm not even a manager.  
more of a marketroid/saleperson. in my first-hand experience trying  
to sell gnu arch, a baroque UI and lack of windows support were major  
limitations. in my second hand experience hearing about competitions  
in which gnu arch was a candidate for corporate or community  
adoption, a baroque UI and poor windows support were major limitations.

if these were limitations that caused major degradations in  
performance or functionality then they certainly should not be  
candidates for inclusion in arch 2.0's feature set. instead, their  
presence would be major bonuses that would set the application apart  
from what is currently in the market.

at the same time, i do not advocate an unreasonable GUI or that the  
system be written in C# and distributed with the entire .net  
framework. that would be nuts.

> From my experience in a rather large software development company,  
> my managers don't really care to use a version control system.   
> They are more interested in the integration of a version control  
> system and a software defect reporting/tracking system.  They want  
> to be able to...

<snip>

> Managers *don't* use version control themselves; the presence or  
> absence of a GUI really doesn't matter to them.  They want to  
> manage their software development and that normally require control  
> over the process.  They would find a GUI to manipulate those  
> controls to be useful.

yes, precisely. if you look back at the scenario that i wrote up, the  
natural progression would be to ask what kind of features that each  
constituent would want and how can they be built?

the reason that i mentioned developing the GUI in a web framework  
like Ruby on Rails (which is not my idea but one created in concert  
with others including Tom) is that the GUI could be a dashboard with  
a view that can be defined by the particular user.

for instance, hackers may have an interface that allows them to check  
in code, check out code, view diffs, etc. QA can see what snapshots  
are ready to be tested and how the results of previous tests.  
sysadmins can see the health of the system. and managers can have a  
view along the lines of what you're talking about.

one example of what the GUI can become is Trac (http:// 
www.edgewall.com/trac/) which has become a very successful software  
product. it has tight integration with SVN, a wiki and a bug/issue  
tracker. of course, given the nature of their software stack it's a  
centralized system.

> It has also been my experience that any system relying upon a GUI  
> to get anything done is going to suck ass, unless the things being  
> done are rather simple.  Version control can have complex moments.

right. CLI still takes precedence for complex tasks. my conception of  
a GUI though is less about those requirements.

> Of course, if you believe that Windows support is critical you  
> would (by necessity) believe that a GUI is critical.

yes, i suppose that is true.

talli