Re: An analysis of why Polipo is unmaintainable

Will Manley <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 27, 2012, at 16:51, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> > Boutier and Kerneis have made available a draft of their latest paper:
> > 
> >   Matthieu Boutier, Gabriel Kerneis.  Generating events with style.
> >   Submitted for publication.  October 2012.
> > 
> >   http://hal-univ-diderot.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/74/29/02/PDF/kerneis-boutier-2013.pdf
> > 
> > Pages 5, 6 and 9 constitute a good analysis of why Polipo is
> > unmaintainable.  (Note that this is a draft, and hasn't been peer
> > reviewed yet.)
> 
> With respect I don't think that suggests that Polipo is unmaintainable.

I agree.

> In my opinion the biggest barrier to easy maintainership and the reason
> that you have found it difficult to find a replacement for yourself as
> chief Polipo maintainer comes down to two aspects:
>  * The lack of automated tests.  Making changes to a mature code-base
>  requires confidence that you are not breaking anything or otherwise
>  causing regressions to any of the requirements on that codebase.  This
>  means there needs to be some knowledge of both the diverse way the code
>  is used, how it's expected to behave and how a particular change can
>  affect these use-cases.  In Polipo's case this information is encoded
>  in your head and it would be a great effort on another's part to reach
>  that same level of understanding.  With good automated tests this
>  information is encoded in the tests so someone can be an effective
>  maintainer even if their understanding of both the software and the
>  problem domain is incomplete.
> * The fact that the current master branch is not release worthy and only
> you know why and how means that there is a lot of work for a new
> maintainer to do before the fruits of their labour pay off.

Another, in my opinion more important, aspect is that there simply
aren't too many people interested in spending a significant amount
of time working on HTTP implementations for free.

For example Privoxy is not event-driven and has automated tests
(of course one never has enough tests) and yet the project isn't
exactly overrun by volunteers either.

Fabian

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