Re: Unmaintained Packages
Colin Watson dijo [Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 11:23:01AM +0100]:
> > 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.
Agree totally with Colin here. Not only that, but also rewriting it
gradually will help deploy a more modularized new version. Even if the
original code must (temporarily at least) be infested with unmodularized
functions that act merely as stubs pointing at the new ones and all that
mess, the result tends to be more manageable.
As Theo de Raadt says, if you want to introduce new bugs, reimplement.
Reimplementing anything that is not exactly trivial will bring new
problems. And, although I am not a big fan of the OpenBSD attitude, I
would be a fool to disagree with such a guru in such an obvious point :)
Greetings,
--
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.cx - (+52-55)5630-9700 ext. 1366
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