Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Back then, I was young and naive and deluded enough to think that porting Krita to a new version of Qt would automatically make Krita better. Porting itself was an exciting adventure, and using new technology was fun all by itself.

But porting to Qt 4 was a complete and utter disaster and it took us many years to finally get to a Qt 4-based version of Krita that was ready for users: Krita 2.4, released April 11th, 2012. There were reasons for that beyond the mere porting, of course, including the fact that, like fools, we couldn't resist doing a complete refactoring of the basic KOffice libraries.

— Boudewijn Rempt reflects on some lessons learned the hard way.

But I'll just say: getting users back from what? Why do we need to convert the small pool of Linux users, when a larger pool of non-Linux users exists to be tapped?

— Emmanuele Bassi

Since it makes pulling so difficult, perhaps we should change its name to Teeth instead of Git.

— Richard Stallman

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Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 9, 2015 17:39 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (9 responses)

I found this quote spoke to me from Boudewijn's article:

Likewise, having to rewrite existing code because someone found a new, better way of handling boolean values in a C library for reading and writing a particular file format is not helping. Your library might be much better quality, now, code-wise, but I, as your user don't give a damn. Just like my users don't give a damn what my code looks like; it only needs to work. I only care about whether your software helps me to deliver features to my users. Don't tell me the new way is cleaner -- that's an illusion anyway. Don't insult me by telling me the new way will make my maintenance-burden smaller, because you've just added a load to it right away.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 9, 2015 20:38 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

While true, technical debt *will* accumulate. It has to be taken care of at some point. Hopefully before a rewrite is the simpler way.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 9, 2015 20:55 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (1 responses)

The original quote was about having to rewrite code because a sub-library has rewritten its code or how it works has changed. That says to me that the technical debt in the underlying library wasn't taken care of. It was at best a refinancing but most likely an increase in technical debt.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 13, 2015 14:41 UTC (Mon) by tseaver (guest, #1544) [Link]

I like it, especially as arguments to "refinance technical debt" can be countered by queries about the "closing costs" for the new loan.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 9, 2015 21:44 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (5 responses)

>Don't tell me the new way is cleaner -- that's an illusion anyway. Don't insult me by telling me the new way will make my maintenance-burden smaller, because you've just added a load to it right away.

Words of wisdom that apply to any interface design, be it code or user. I have high hopes now that Krita 3.0 will follow that line of thinking and *not* make sweeping changes.

That'd be a bold decision that, unfortunately, one rarely sees large projects make nowadays.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 16, 2015 7:26 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, we plan some big things: for this year, full animation support and a big performance improvement. As well as the usual bug fixes, performance improvements and workflow improvements.

Further down the road, python scripting, a text tool based on css and moving all vector object support to svg and who knows what then? Painting on a 3D model has been something we've wanted to do for a long time.

Oh, and the Qt5 port, of course... That might make it possible to release on Android as well, although how urgent that is, is debatable, now that Wacom has stopped the Cintiq Hybrid line.

But I have no intenation at all of making our users learn a new way for working...

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 16, 2015 13:14 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

Just to let you know, Qt4 on OS X is getting harder and harder to track. There is no Qt4 release which works out-of-the-box on 10.9 or 10.10. Patches exist (and have been applied to 5.x), but 4.8 stays stagnant (and macports and brew didn't apply the 10.9 patch last I checked). I expect Qt4 will be a large enough roadblock for cross platform apps with future OS X releases that Qt5 is more sensible.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 16, 2015 13:41 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, I built Qt 4.8 on 10.9 (together with my hacked macdeployqt, stripped kdelibs and all the other deps) for the experimental Krita release. I didn't need any patches, but I stripped down the build a lot: no openssl, no webkit, no scripting, no database drivers...

Krita on OSX is extremely buggy, but I don't know whether that's because of Qt 4.8 or Krita.

I've always found OSX ghastly to work on, and I only boot the macmini to make new builds until I have time to really look into making the port good enough for real users.

Weirdly enough there still are people who are using Krita on OSX for real work...

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 16, 2015 14:40 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

You're going to need this[1] patch for running on 10.9 and up (it all builds fine). Modal dialogs cause SIGBUS from the Cocoa runtime without it. For 10.10, Qt needs patched to recognize the 10.10 SDK directory as valid (corewlan symbols missing is the symptom here).

And I don't disagree about it being a pain to develop on. I tend to SSH back into a Linux box and attach to tmux with Vim running in it whenever I'm on my OS X machines.

[1]https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-37699?focusedCommen...

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 16, 2015 14:58 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Thanks! I'll rebuild Qt with that patch.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 10, 2015 15:51 UTC (Fri) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link]

Maybe it is time distributions start using Limba for distributing *user-facing* and productivity tools.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 16, 2015 9:27 UTC (Thu) by chojrak11 (guest, #52056) [Link]

Full thread about Teeth here: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/184155/focus=18...
That's one of the reasons Richard Stallman should step down and start planting gardens instead of fighting innovation... Emacs and GCC are not doing well these years.