Looking a Novell gift horse in the mouth [LWN.net]

Looking a Novell gift horse in the mouth

Posted Feb 9, 2006 18:04 UTC (Thu) by pimlott (subscriber, #1535)
In reply to: Looking a Novell gift horse in the mouth by Quartz
Parent article: Looking a Novell gift horse in the mouth

since [Novell] gave the code away, Gnome can take its time to review and integrate at their pace.

This is harder than you make it sound. Incorporating a piece of independently developed code, so that you can understand and maintain it, while retaining a coherent design, is a significant project. Especially as the original developers may not have much incentive to help--they've already shipped, and probably gone on to the next project. So a code drop puts the GNOME developers into a difficult position: Either accept the code as is, creating a less maintainable code-base; go through the painful process of incorporating it gradually; or reject valuable funtionality. If the code were developed in the open, they wouldn't be pushed into this corner.

I don't think that Jeff's comments were hyperbole. This is how fragmentation happens.

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Do or Do Not Do: Either is Fine

Posted Feb 11, 2006 6:00 UTC (Sat) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link]

They can look at the code; and decide if there are bits of if that they
want. They can decide that there are big enough chunks with clear enough
interfaces that they can be integrated into their work.

Or they can decide that it's too hard and that it'll be easier to just re-write.

Or they can decide that the features aren't sufficiently compelling.

Probably what's going to happen is that very "theys" will differ in their conclusions and some of them will go off in various directions. Some of the code will be merged; other bits won't --- some will be buggy and some bugs will be discovered and fixed during the merging process.

There will also be those who spend more time whining and pontificating than actually code or even reading code.

JimD