Subject: Time to step up and talk...
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue May 01 2001 - 16:25:36 CDT
Ok,
I'm tired of this bickering. It is neither friendly nor productive, and all
of our times are better spent hacking on AbiWord or twiddling our thumbs or
whatever it is that we all like to do. So I'll be brief and blunt:
AbiWord 1.0 isn't the beginning, nor is it the end. But it's one hell of an
important milestone. I don't want to screw this release up, because it very
well could be the most important release in Abi's history. I have a strong
feeling that our public perception will be strongly based on how good of a
job we do with the 1.0 release.
Abi 1.0 can not and will not be as featureful as WordXP in a
short-timeframe. It's just a fact of life. We'd need to devote an enourmous
amount of man-hours and resources that we don't have at the moment (nor is
it likely that we will ever have). And I'm not sure that this is a
worthwhile goal either.
The unfortunate fact is that time, knowledge, knowhow, ambition, and
developers are all limited resouces and should be considered scarce. We must
do the best with what we have. To do so requires some extensive planning and
organization. This is unavoidable, but who ever said that resource
management was easy?
So, here are some of my thoughts:
Above all other things, Abi 1.0 should be stable - and I mean rock-solid
great-wall-of-china or the pyramids stable. It should be as close to a
"bug-free" state as possible ("bug-lite" is also acceptable IMNSHO,
depending on the priority assigned to any specific bug, but that needs to be
worked out later on a bug-by-bug basis).
Abi 1.0 should also be reasonably featureful. We should have a well-defined
feature-set and implement it well. No gotcha's, no real bugs. We want to go
for the element of least surprise here. This feature set is *NOT* what's on
the website's feature matrix, though many of the matrix's points are quite
valid and deserve to be on our 1.0 list.
So this is the time to speak up with what we expect that 1.0 feature-list to
be. Martin posted a list to the mailing-list of some things that Sam,
Jesper, myself, Joaquin and he had brainstormed at GUADEC last month. This
feature-list should be considered extremely relevant. We're smart guys, and
happen to be the ones out in front leading this project both vocally and by
example/code.
It is extremely important to note that this list isn't set in stone or
anything. We're looking for input from everyone (developers, users, lurkers,
haters, etc...). I have a bunch of other stuff that I'd like to see get into
1.0 too, which I'll post to the list shortly.
This list needs to be *extremely* well defined and agreed upon by some
reasonable consensus. Any of us may choose to disagree with any number of
points, but please do it intelligently and politely. Make your point, point
out examples in your favor or flaws in another's argument, etc... This is
productive, worthwhile, and usually interesting. However, I *refuse* to
tolerate what's been going on lately. Period. We all work to hard to get
"dissed" by our own like that.
So I'd like to split this thread off into another series of threads in which
we'll calmly and intelligently discuss what we expect to see in a 1.0, and
other such limiting factors that we forsee (such as time/interest).
I *am* proud of what Abi is so far, and think that it has a bright future.
Its future is what we make of it here and now. Let's not screw things up.
Dom
/me steps off of the soapbox
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat May 26 2001 - 03:50:59 CDT