Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Barriers to Adoption: exponential userbase size increases

[Adrian Irving-Beer]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2004 at 09:51:51AM -0700, Thomas Lord wrote:

> Anyway: Arch isn't deferring to any tiny installed base.  It's just
> sticking to what makes the most sense to me.  And it's installed
> base keeps growing, afaict, so I can't be *all* wrong.

Devil's advocate for a moment -- sure you can.  It's possible,
although highly unlikely (and IMO, not true), that you could be all
wrong about something like file naming conventions.

One thing I learned from CVS is that so long as there are enough
'rights' to outweigh the 'wrong's, people will adopt and use a piece
of software.

In CVS, of course, the wrongs were theoretically huge, but with
workarounds, they became manageable.  CVS was toppled (again, IMO)
when more projects became complex enough to expose just how bad those
design flaws really were, and when people started looking for
alternatives to hack on, and good thinkers like yourself had concrete
ideas on how to do it.

Speaking personally, I don't mind the file conventions.  I like
several of them, though perhaps I wish western languages had more
punctuation keys to avoid all the shell conflicts.  But aside from
'+', that's so that everyone would be happy and stop griping, rather
than personal inconvenience. ;)

Just pointing out that just because people are moving from one project
to another doesn't mean we shouldn't reexamine some of the more common
gripes to determine their validity, and whether we (myself included)
are perhaps more wrong than we think.

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