coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[Pierre Joye <pierre.php@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 10:18 PM, William A. Rowe Jr. <wmrowe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 5/5/2010 3:01 PM, Pierre Joye wrote:
>> hi,
>>
>> On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 9:45 PM, William A. Rowe Jr. <wmrowe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>> CoApp seeks to be one very specific way to do it.  If it happens to work for the
>>> upstream project, wonderful :)  If not, it's open source, and when it's broke we
>>> get to glue both pieces together.
>>
>> That's what I would like to avoid as much as I can. At least for two things:
>>
>> - naming convention (static vs dynamic .lib for example)
>> - standard binary packages
>>
>> If it fails for these two, then right, CoApp will be just another
>> project that brings nothing to upstream developers. And I really hope
>> that won't be the case :)
>
> What is success?  Naming conventions?  Whatever we pick will be adopted by 10%
> of the world, decried by 10%, and ignored by 80%.

Besides the classic rhetorical answer (which is always enjoyable), I
disagree, especially on Windows. See below.

>> Except indeed if the CoApp goal is to be a distribution-like system.
>> But then I would not have much interest to participate.
>
> If the goal is to push out conventions which OSS developers are expected to
> adhere to, the project participants here can expect high blood pressure and
> burnout within 12 months of the effort.

To create standards that developers can use and rely on is necessary.
Every developer I was talking to were looking for such conventions for
windows. That's the most important thing they miss on Window. It is
not perfect on Unix/Linux but there is at least some well defined
conventions that most of the projects have adopted.

> If the goal is to offer conventions
> and then package much of the open source out there to follow those conventions
> and actually work out of the box for users and developers, the project's
> participants should be very satisfied with their success 12 months after the
> initial offering.

Nice ideal, but I don't think the linux distributions model (as in
debian, redhat, etc.) can apply well to the Windows world. However
there are a lot that we can learn from it, packages, conventions for
example.

Cheers,
-- 
Pierre

@pierrejoye | http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org