On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 4:04 AM, Bob Ham <[email protected]> wrote: > > I will now make a concrete suggestion: start writing things down.
It's interesting that you would point to the Hurd as an example of how a software project should be run, perhaps if they had spent more time on code and less on documentation, as Linux did, Linux wouldn't have utterly won that battle. The GNU Hurd is a cautionary tale, not a model for software development. As for your belief that documentation will solve everything (as it clearly didn't for GNU Hurd), you may not be aware of the "Agile manifesto", which has become the dominant project management methodology over the past 15 years or so. On of the tenants of this is "Working software over comprehensive documentation". You may also be unaware that in the ideal case, well-written code is self-documenting, making external documentation unnecessary. This is one of the tenants of the "clean code" methodology. Unfortunately our codebase certainly does not live up to this ideal, however time would be better spent improving our code such that it is self-documenting, rather than producing vast amounts of documentation nobody will read. I don't claim that we are perfect, far from it, but if you think that dropping everything and producing vast amounts of documentation will solve anything, I'm afraid you're mistaken. Ian. _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list [email protected] https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
