On 11/4/06, iain duncan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Every single comparison of Gears to Django I have read say something to > the effect of "Gears is more community based". I think that's pretty > clear if you read between the lines. And part of what I'm going on about > is addressed in your blog, so obviously you have also encountered these > perceptions too.
I don't think that's the same thing. The common bit of FUD thrown by evangelicals new to the TG camp is that Django suffers from arrogance about refusing to use anything that wasn't developed for Django itself, and that TG is more "community based" because it glues together a bunch of existing projects. Experienced members of their community know perfectly well why we have the stack we have, and seem to have no problem with it. The other prime source of NIH accusations is the developer of another Python framework who I won't name here, and who really ought to know better. But saying that Django suffers from NIH is not the same as saying Django has a closed development process, so I'm still waiting for an actual example here. > I disagree here again. If you believe the only goal is to produce good > software as fast as possible, then yes, you are correct. But management > is not only about short term goals. In other words, my point is that I > think Django has done an amazing job of short term management, I mean, > god damned amazing, hats off. But continuing the same path will be at > the potential expense of long term goals. Management absolutely needs to > change as a project grows and matures, we know that to be true. That > which gets the best immediate results is not usually the same thing that > gets the best long term results, and that which is appropriate at the > beginning of a long and complicated project is not going to continue to > be the best plan for ever. So far as I can tell, our biggest long-term management problem right now is not one of scaring developers away, it's one of keeping track of all the people who want to get involved and all the things they want to do. You haven't yet provided an example to the contrary. > Is it worth it in the long term? *If* one of the long term goals is to > attract a growing dev community that can in the future outdo current > productivity levels, then absolutely yes. You have *no idea* who is > lurking on here. You could have super geniuses who don't feel inclined > to comment because they see little of that type of discussion or because > they don't feel their input is really wanted. Actually, we do have a few "super geniuses" of the web app world lurking, and thus far when they've commented we've paid attention worked with their suggestions. > And here's the catch, they *won't say anything*. Most will just ... > leave. Another extremely important sales/management truth is that the > people you turn off *will not tell you* while the people who love you > will yak their mouths off. So you absolutely can not believe that just > because you only *hear* positive feedback that everything is cool. > Developers who maybe decide they would be more welcome at RoR or Gears > aren't going to say anything here when they make that decision! The problem here is that there is absolutely no way to quantify this. It could be that, just within the last twenty-four hours, five million potential genius developers have looked at the dev list archive and immediately written it off for not having enough traffic. Or it could be that they didn't. Appealing to something that can't be quantified isn't a useful argument; appealing to actual examples of people speaking up (and they shouldn't be hard to find -- software developers are notoriously opinionated and willing to share their opinions) is. > Well I can't say I feel the need to do so as the impression I get from > this reply and your blog is that you are more concerned with "being > right" ( proving Django is doing everything right as it stands ) than > "getting what you want" ( having Django become as good as it could be ). No, my concern is with figuring out how concerned I need to be about this. You've repeatedly made claims about "perceptions" you think people have of Django, but have yet to produce an example of someone other than yourself holding these perceptions. The only hard references you've provided are to books on project management which, while undoubtedly very useful references in the abstract sense, are necessarily of somewhat nebulous applicability to actual situations without more information, information which seem to be saying you have, but have not supplied. Django is not perfect. Django is not always right. Django is not all-knowing or all-seeing or all-powerful. Django has and always will have problems of varying degrees of criticality. But right now I cannot for the life of me figure out whether you're pointing out a problem that it has, and if so how critical that problem is at the given moment. So consider a thought experiment. Imagine that you're a developer on an open source project; of course, you do your best to keep up with what people are saying about the project, and while there are more than a few people who prefer a different project's software, there are also more than a few who prefer yours. What's more, you've got lots of people joining your mailing list, hanging out in your IRC channel, posting tickets and submitting patches, you've incorporated all sorts of useful features that people came up with, you've expanded commit access to a number of people who weren't part of the project originally, you've got branches going maintained by volunteers, you've been a Google SoC organization... And then one day, out of the blue, someone new posts to your mailing list that your project is widely perceived as being closed to "outsiders", and that your project has serious long-term image problems. When asked, this person does not supply any examples of people expressing this perception, and instead becomes combative and accuses you of trying to defend your project no matter what. If you were the developer in that position, how would you be reacting right now? A large part of any good software project is learning to understand other people's points of view; I've tried to tease out where yours comes from and haven't gotten anywhere, so now I'm trying to explain to you where mine comes from. If the things you're talking about really do exist as a widespread perception in the open source community, then we have a serious problem. But I've reached the limit of where I can go without getting some more information from you. Obviously I'm going to be skeptical of what you're saying, because the response we've gotten from developers so far has been fairly overwhelmingly positive. If that response has masked a significant undercurrent of dissatisfaction, then we need to know about it. But if we haven't managed to see it so far, we're not going to manage to see it without help -- if you want this horse to drink, you've got to lead it to the water. So if there is a significant image or perception problem we need to be aware of, I need you to start showing me examples of it. -- "May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." -- George Carlin --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
