Michael Wechner wrote:
I think a CMS such as for instance Lenya is being developed for
people/companies actually using it or maybe in other words the "customer
is king"
this is a very important point, but it's also a very double-edged sword.
as many list regulars know (i think i've been whining a lot), i got
bitten by this issue quite badly during the last year, and i have cursed
the endless development cycle and intrusive changes and trunk brokenness
more than once.
but after delving in more closely, i found that the mess lenya was in is
in part due to a very customer-oriented feature-driven approach.
we had lots of code duplication with really stupid bugs, horrible
non-orthogonal interfaces, "works only in my special case" code, arcane
features spread out over fifteen different files in six different
languages and hastily introduced ad-hockeries by the wagonload. all to
introduce a needed feature or to address a customer request, quickly.
all those things have piled up to become a very cumbersome legacy indeed.
when ranting to friends about this, i jokingly called it the "web
designer approach to programming": everything's aimed at getting this
new button into the user interface real quick, and as soon as it looks
good, we go on to something else.
everything used to be just tacked on, instead of rethinking and
restructuring existing code along the way.
now, after years of tedious clean-up work and refactoring, we are
pulling ourselves out of the mess by our bootstrings, and things look good.
*.*
so yes, i do agree that we need shorter release cycles, incremental
improvements and more rigorous QA in the future. in that respect, the
customer should be king.
but we also need some moderation wrt introducing the neat feature of the
day ("if you can't do it strictly self-contained, think harder or clean
up the core until you can"), and we need to get our users to stay close
to the trunk.
with lenya 1.2, i can't help thinking that every deployment was
practically a fork. let's hope that with the modularization of 1.4,
users will be able to keep their customizations in modules, sync with
the trunk more easily and regularly and not drift into forks.
i think it's a matter of fairness to consider these legacy issues when
discussing the path lenya has taken for the last 2 years - there has
been much to learn for everybody involved.
--
Jörn Nettingsmeier
Kurt is up in heaven now.
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