On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 05:27:36PM +0200, Tommaso Cucinotta wrote: > Il 04/05/2011 17:16, Rob Oakes ha scritto: > > > >>Software bloat is a term used to describe the tendency of newer computer > >>programs to have a larger installation footprint, or have many unnecessary > >>features that are not used by end users, or just generally use more system > >>resources than necessary, while offering little or no benefit to its users. > [...] > >But I'm all for helping to reduce the memory footprint and optimizing code, > >but I think we should think carefully before removing existing features. > > On a related note, does anyone know how much "bloating" effect comes > from the use of more and more recent Qt (or other libraries, i..e, > boost) versions :-) ?
Most certainly not. And the minimum requirements of LyX on both are not even remotely "recent". > Also, if really we have too many features, what about trying to > embed some modularity in LyX and make them dynamically loadable > on-demand ? Overengineered extra code to maintain. Plugin systemis only (or rather, "at most") make sense if there's a decent chance to have third parties creating plugins that are not maintained/distributed with the main product. For LyX, assuming a probability of zero for that case seems to be a good first approximation. > (i.e., dynamically linked libraries/plugins loaded on > demand) Or, confine some features into external tools launched on > demand, as opposed to have it integrated into the main code ? (e.g., > what is the current implementation model for the "Compare Document" > feature ? Is it "integrated" in LyX, or does it call an external > program ?) The maintenance effort will outweigh any potential benefits by several orders of magnitude. > But, first of all maybe we need clear measurements for assessing > whether or not any of the above is really necessary. I don't think it's worthwhile to spend time to come to obvious conclusions, but I certainly won't stop anyone doing that. Andre'
