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Re: [phpGroupWare-developers] New developers (Was: Nested db-objects)


From: Alan Langford
Subject: Re: [phpGroupWare-developers] New developers (Was: Nested db-objects)
Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 22:18:47 -0400
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)



On 2008-05-26 20:14, Chris Weiss wrote:
On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Sigurd Nes <address@hidden> wrote:
My problem is that my code base is huge - and I can't keep up with rapid
changes in what is considered proper coding at all time.

the only change to the coding that standards that has even been
proposed in the last 5 years or more was the line lengths.  We've had
a coding standards doc since very early, and IMO the separation of
logic and storage is clear, but it's been ignored and allowed to go
unchallenged, much to my frustration every time i do try to work on
some code.

However, as an example of how "no tolerance" affects smaller teams,
the eGW fork is directly related to putting a foot down on not
following the design goals and standards.  Joomla being a CMS has a
large enough demand that they can afford to do this.  We do it and
loose half the team.

At the risk of being accused of putting words in someone's mouth, my interpretation of what Sigurd said has less to do with standards for formatting code and more to do with standards for software design. As an example, a couple of years ago, templates were cool, now anything that's not MVC sucks. This is a reflection of the ongoing evolution of software development from a fine art to an engineering discipline. It's been a constant factor for several decades, and it's likely to continue at the same pace for some time to come.

It's very difficult to track this evolution when you have a significant body of code to maintain. In a lot of cases, the most viable solution is to trash existing code and implement from scratch, saving little more than the UI design and the evolved definition of requirements. I am very sympathetic to this complaint, having been in the same position countless times over the years. However, I have come to accept that it's almost always worth the time to invest in moving to the new methods, given that they've been well proved in practice. One of my fundamental assumptions is that anything I am proud of writing today will be something I consider to be embarrassing garbage in four year's time. These days I just factor this in to my development plans.

The way I see it you can invest twice as much time as you expected tracking these sorts of changes now, or ten times as much trying to dig yourself out of a very deep hole later.

As for "no tolerance", there really isn't much of that with Joomla. Aside from losing a lot of talent in the huge "extensions must be GPL" issue, which was driven from legal interpretations of the GPL more than some deep seated philosophy, proposals and differences of opinion are usually worked out through long (sometimes very long) discussions in the lists and forums. We try very hard to come to a well reasoned consensus before making something policy. This is seriously complicated by the popularity of the package, since no matter what is done, some segment of the user base will become very upset as a result. What we would not tolerate is this sort of morale-sucking sniping between team members. It's hard to remember sometimes that the biggest reward of working on open source software is that it can be fun. We work hard to preserve that. It's all about having fun.






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