Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

stan eiqep_eiwo_y at cox.net
Fri May 22 18:10:49 UTC 2009


Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 10:23 -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
>> On Fri, 22 May 2009, Tom Horsley wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 22 May 2009 10:12:57 -0400 (EDT)
>>> Seth Vidal wrote:
>>>
>>>> if some package you used a while back is still around and still being
>>>> worked on then chances are good it has improved.
>>> And if it is open source, chances are good it still has no
>>> documentation :-).
>> And since it is open source, instead of just being snarky about it - you 
>> can actually contribute to that project and fix the lack of code.
> 
> Quote alleged from the book, "Real Programmers Don't Eat Quiche" on
> documenting your code: "Look, if it was hard to write, it should be hard
> to understand!" :) 
> 
Speaking as an (ex?) programmer, writing the code is fun, writing the documentation is pure drudgery.  And really, the 
only person who can realistically write documentation is the programmer.  They know all the ins and outs of the code, 
and the functionality they programmed in.  It can be done through an intermediary, someone who questions the programmers 
and finds out the functionality and then writes it in comprehensible language, but the chance that someone unfamiliar 
with the code is going to write decent documentation is pretty slim.

Of course, in the days when code was written to specs, the specs were the kernel of the documentation and only needed to 
be modified with changes.  I don't think there are such things as specs in the open source world, just some general 
vision statement of what the software should accomplish, usually about as detailed as the description from the RPM. :-)




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