On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Martin S. Weber <martin.we...@nist.gov>wrote:
> If you have fossil as a library, having something to remote-control the
> fossil library is the next logical step. Of course if you're an IDE person,
> you'll appreciate easier integration with, say, the behemothian eclipse, the
> leviathan netbeans, the Zizian IDEA or the all-encompassing emacs. In case
> you aren't and want a finer grained control and scriptability than is doable
> right now with shell scripts and parsing the output of fossil, then I think
> you'll appreciate integration with a (script) language. One point of the
> whole integration is, as has been stated already, for it to be optional (not
> the fossil as library part, but the remote control part). No harm done for
> you if you don't want to use it; just as there's no harm done if you don't
> want to use the wiki, tickets, the user management, the web UI, i.e., fossil
> as a swiss army knife.
>
The "it doesn't cost anything if you don't use it" argument is common for
people advocating new software features. It's also bogus.
The major problem, of course, is that "you" is seldom the only user
involved, and if some other user decides to use said feature, "you" may not
have any choice but to pay the cost involved in their doing so.
The second problem is that "doesn' t cost anything" is almost always false.
The only way for their to be no cost is if every code path is the same with
and without the feature in question. Not without using it, but without
adding it at all. If that's true, then how does the new feature get invoked?
You usually need some test to decide if the new feature is being used. Plus
the the disk space used by the code implementing the feature, the virtual
space that's using, etc. Yeah, the sum total may be very small, and almost
nothing. But that's why the call it feature creep - each feature adds almost
nothing. But the difference between nothing and almost nothing is a
difference in quality, not quantity, and enough almost nothings gets you
bloatware.
In this case, an optional fossil library that is used to extend TCL (or your
favorite scripting language) is really another application. Or maybe it's a
build option that uses jimtcl instead of th1. In those cases, it actually
costs nothing if you don't install it. But what happens when you clone a
repo that uses it if you haven't installed it?
<mike
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