Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 14:21:59 -0500 From: "Drews, Jonathan*" <DrewsJ@cder.fda.gov> To: "'freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org'" <freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org> Subject: Are the Open Source desktops too complicated? Message-ID: <4C88DC099E9AF945A6DA4D6FFA1865D17D728F@cdsx06.cder.fda.gov>
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Hi: I read portions of the "Desktop FreeBSD" thread and have to agree somewhat with Joao Schim's remarks. I did docs on Kde (Kformula, Kchart, and Kget) and my experience was that the developers were more interested in adding features rather than getting the bugs squashed. I finally gave up on contributing to Kde because locating bugs was becoming extremely difficult. In some cases my bug reports were just closed out. I tend to agree with Victoria Livschitz, a senior IT architect with Sun Microsystems. Perhaps the Kde (and Gnome) desktops are becoming to complicated for volunteers to adequately maintain? Excerpt: Question] Jaron Lanier has argued that we cannot write big programs with a lot of code without creating many bugs, which he concludes is a sign that something is fundamentally wrong Victoria] I agree with Jaron's thesis completely. The correlation of the size of the software with its quality is overwhelming and very suggestive. I think his observations raise numerous questions: Why are big programs so buggy? And not just buggy, but buggy to a point beyond salvation. Is there an inherent complexity factor that makes bugs grow exponentially, in number, severity, and in how difficult they are to diagnose? If so, how do we define complexity and deal with it? From: The Next Move in Programming: A Conversation with Sun's Victoria Livschitz http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/livschitz_qa.html Kind regards, Jonathan ____ ___ _______ / __/______ ___ / _ )/ __/ _ \ / _// __/ -_) -_) _ |\ \/ // / /_/ /_/ \__/\__/____/___/____/
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