Re: critical issues

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> In my idle moments, I like to discourage myself by trying to
> figure out how long it would take to achieve something
> "reasonable" for users.  Let's play this game now, and start
> making some unrealistic-but-just-possible assumptions:
> 1. "reasonable" means 100 bugs.  Let's also assume that these can
> be the 100 most problematic bugs (i.e. we can fix the easy ones
> first without penalizing this "reasonable" goal).
> 2. with the new lilydev iso, we can gather 10 new programmers.
> Keith, Phil, Janek, etc.
> 3. each of those 10 programmers can fix an average of 1 issue
> every 10 days.  By "fix", I mean "understand the problem, read the
> code, produce patches for review, respond to comments, make new
> drafts, and have somebody push the final fix".
> 4. the existing developers are capable of doing all the reviewing
> for all these patches.
> 5. we continue to get approximately 1 new issue every 3 days.

That's developing logistics for pails in order to deal with an
unfinished roof because nobody remembers where the trapdoor to the attic
was.  The number of bugs is not the problem.  The problem is that the
skills needed to deal with the bugs and other problems are not in a
sensible relation to the complexity of the bugs.

A _sensible_ investment of time would be to move a considerable number
of engravers to Scheme.  And keep them _there_ rather than just doing it
as an example.  Presto, we get a bunch of code (_iff_ the style of
Scheme is not wallowing inscrutably in macros and idiosyncrasies like
some of the C++ code) that can be maintained with more confidence than
"poke with a stick and see what happens".

Then the roof at least leaks in accessible places.

-- 
David Kastrup