Re: Moving away from make

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 09:50:52AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
>> Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>> > Yes, various expert FLOSS members (such as Reinhold, Carl, and
>> > IIRC yourself) have stepped forward to fix a few things in the
>> > builds -- but the only people who are "working" on the build
>> > system "full time" are windows users.
>> 
>> Uh, you changed topic.  The topic was "the casual contributor", not
>> "working fulltime".
>
> My apologies.  You are correct.  I need to stop talking.
> Especially these days, when I'm disagreeing with everybody for no
> good reason.

When things go wrong too much, not least of all because people don't
listen to policies and good reason, disagreement is a natural impulse,
more natural than rereading carefully.

It happens occasionally that I find myself in the situation where in the
progression of a heated disagreement I want to dig up the original
quotes starting the fight, and they are not quite what I remembered,
much more ambiguous.  Probably not quite what the other side remembered
either.

Anyway, I know the scenario "enthusiastic contributor redoes a subsystem
according to his own ideas and tools, and sometime later leaves" too
well.  It is rarely a well-scaling idea even in a corporate environment
when the chances for continuity are usually better than in free
projects: shifting workloads almost always mean that the original author
at some point of time no longer can reasonably be bothered with
exclusive maintenance.

Historically grown systems often are garbage heaps, so "redo from
scratch" may really offer reasonable improvement with permanent
advantages.  And it is a psychological crutch to do it with a different
tool/toolset because then the temptation to reuse parts that work so-so
is not there.  I've seen that kind of thing.  But then it ends in the
"to make this really maintainable for the bulk of people who will end up
working on it, we ought to redo it again, this time reimplementing it
for the old tools again" phase, and guess how much motivation to do that
is there among the few people who actually bothere to learn the new
system.

Project management sucks.  I don't envy you.

-- 
David Kastrup