Re: KDE: inclusion

On Monday 09 of February 2004 19:20, Andreas Grau wrote:
> Just a very personal comment on this idea: I would think that the
> software needs something different than a wider audience.

Software itself needs nothing. :)
It's people who need software.

> November last 
> year, ie. over 2 months ago, I described 2 bugs in kmemaid: not even a
> comment on this, let alone fixes. memaid has no serious import (beside a
> buggy queue.txt thing), no export, no printing, no support, no real
> external documentation, no internal documentation, no error-free
> installation ...

Hey, easy. :)
Before being angry with us, please keep in mind we did and do all the work for 
free. And we have our lives, need to earn a living, appear on uni, etc.
Klemens did much very good work, and thanks to him for this.
He seems currently very busy, and indeed: one may feel angry that bugs 
submitted few months ago are not yet fixed...
But we cannot require from Klemens anything. I myself don't use KMemAid (in 
fact I myself had a bug to fix in MemAid and release next version), but if 
you do and see what can be improved: how about improving it yourself?
(e.g. documentation shouldn't be hard to write even if one doesn't have a clue 
about programming)

In fact: 
- import by queue.txt should be very easy to fix (I could see the code and fix 
it soon if nobody else being closer to Kmemaid sources wants to fix it)
- export... (uhm, there is no export? there is in MemAid so should be easy to 
port to KmemAid, and after all - why do you need it?)
- printing - probably is very easy to implement, but nobody claimed for such 
need yet
- external documentation? there is a KmemAid Handbook. Besides: I believe it's 
better to spend time writing easy to use software (that requires no manual at 
all), than spend time to write tons of manuals, and leaves software 
non-intuitve to use.
- error-free installation? it works without errors I believe on Klemens' SuSe 
installation (otherwise Klemens would fix it)...

> More people using kmemaid mean more help-requests, more problems, more
> work.

Yes, hard to not agree here.
But people don't pay for support from developers (therefore cannot require 
it), and more users doesn't always imply 'more work'.
(If all bugs will be fixed, and Kmemid will be easy to use - there won't be 
much work at all).
Some of users may be future developers.
In open source software this is great: you don't like something, change it 
yourself, improve it yourself. People share with others and expect others 
will help improving software, right?
The wider audience, the more people from the audience help improving the 
software.
In fact: I released MemAid open sourced in hope that people will help me 
improving it.

> [...]
> Again, no offense intended with the above. Just some thinking.

Yup. I don't charm that K/MemAid is now actively supported, because it's not.
There are pros and cons, and some people will decide.
Nevertheless, if KDE people will decide KMemAid to be in the KDE, then 
obviously we will feel more responsible, e.g. for faster fixing bugs.

-- 
David Calinski
http://neodave.civ.pl


-------------------------------------------------------
The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004
Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration
See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn