Hi Eric,
> > Should they go in?
>
>No way.
I strongly share Eric's opinion here.
>There's a very simple, obvious characteristic which distinguishes
>immature dev teams from strong ones:
>
> Strong product teams know how to finish a release
> that does not satisfy all their hopes and expectations.
Good development teams know how to finish a release, yes. They know and
accept that their release won't satisfy each of their hopes and
expectations. But seeing as how we don't have any non-self-imposed deadlines
or other goals, it's important to note that the normal business ideology
doesn't exactly fit like a glove, regardless of your statement: "Don't make
any excuses for how open source teams should operate differently..."
Our luxury (bane?) is that we get to choose what goes into our 1.0 release,
more-or-less. My point (and the point of all these threads that I've just
spun-off) is to be a "requirements gathering." Based on the merits of each
argument and the liklelyhood of that feature actually getting completed (and
done correctly) we will choose what we'd like to call 1.0. It is important
to get these things out in the open. It's also important for people to play
devil's advocate, so that we are all kept on our toes and conscious of our
greater goal - to produce a quality 1.0 release in a reasonable amount of
time.
It's important to make the cut somewhere and for the right decisions. You
have to draw that line in the sand. But you also have to know where to draw
that line... The nature of this project is such that this means that we get
to choose where to draw that line. That also means that we have to enforce
some policy to ensure that that line is not crossed. And as you and Paul
note, this is a lot harder than it seems.
> 2. Right now you have no users at all, at least none that
> are Normal People. (If you are reading this note, there
> is virtually no chance at all that you are normal.)
> Unhappy users are better than no users.
While I've agreed with your comments thus far, I don't agree with this one
at all. We're shipped with every linux distribution. We're shipped by
Ximian. We go out on QNX cds. We are like #1 download on the Be sites. We're
#2 or so on Sourceforge downloads. And certainly not all of those downloads
are coming from people on this list :-)
The number and quality of bug-reports and *surge* in activity on the user
list of late all point to exactly the opposite: we're getting quite a few
interested users, and a lot of them are Normal People (tm) who are trying to
use AbiWord in their daily lives. I'm happy that many people find it useful!
>should operate differently. You guys are holding AbiWord 1.0
>up against the highest standard you can find. What you *should*
>be doing is holding yourselves, as a team, up against the
>highest standard you can find. I've watched this group for a
>very long time. You are capable of being a good product team.
>Do it.
Great advice. Thank you once again Eric.
Dom
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