Re: Unmaintained Packages
On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 07:49:34PM +1000, Brian May wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 09:32:38AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > If you can't tell, I'm allergic to this "let's rewrite it from scratch"
> > thing that seems to be popular lately. If you have something good that
> > has some problems, don't try to solve those problems by throwing it out
> > and starting again! All you'll do that way is come up with a whole new
> > set of problems. The only excuse for rewriting from scratch is when the
> > old code is unmaintainable, and (on the basis of the small hacks I've
> > made to dpkg in the past) I don't see any evidence that it should be
> > unmaintainable by competent people.
>
> Sometimes rewriting from scratch can be a good thing.
>
> You can learn from design decision mistakes made in the previous version
> instead of constantly patching over them.
>
> Just because dpkg is not unmaintainable in your opinion doesn't mean
> the design can't be improved to make it more flexible, for example.
In my experience, this is almost always better handled by gradual
rewriting than by a total ground-up effort. You get validation at each
stage; it's easier for other people to review the changes and confirm
that functionality and correctness haven't been lost; and you can
introduce improvements to users more quickly because they don't have to
wait until a huge rewrite-from-scratch is stable enough to deploy. There
are exceptions, but I believe they're very rare.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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