Re: [Jsynthlib-devel] 10th anniversary

[Roger W. <ro...@us...>]

2011/9/22 Joe Emenaker <jo...@em...>:
> On 9/21/2011 11:19 PM, Roger Westerlund wrote:
>> 2011/9/20 William Zwicky<wrz...@po...>:
>>> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 11:28 PM, Roger Westerlund
>>> <ro...@us...>  wrote:
>>>> Or why don't we release a 1.0. That would be a bold move.
>>> 3.11 Enterprise Edition.  Comfortable now?
>
> Let's do it like Chrome, where we roll out a new major version number
> every couple of weeks! :)

Or like Forefox new versioning scheme.

Let's not. :-)

>> I believe we decide when we are stable. I have a hard time believing
>> that during the 10 years JSL has lived that we have not been in a
>> "stable" state at some point. And if we haven't, will we ever be
>> stable?
>
> Well, it *was* fairly stable, in times passed, but right now isn't one
> of those times.

I recall that the last time I tried to pick it up again from svn, it
did not work at all for me so I dropped it right away.

> Now, I think I get your point about version numbers and public
> perception. Whenever I'm browsing Sourceforge, and I see a version
> number like "0.10" or "0.28", I figure that the software is still only
> in its "proof of concept" stage, that most features are unimplemented,
> many things don't work right, and that it crashes frequently. In short,
> I figure that it will be more frustrating to try to use it that it would
> be to not use it at all.

That was exactly my point. Never underestimate public perception.

> JSL isn't quite *that* bad, but I do find the UI to be very
> counter-intuitive and I see lots of run-time exceptions thrown in the
> console. If "1.0" is earned just by merely doing something useful and
> doing it fairly reliably, then I'd put the current code at about 0.85 or
> 0.90.

I have seen some fairly crappy things at 1.0 in my times. They have
only been usable at version 3 or something. There could, of course, be
a point that you don't want to release anything that scares people
away and call it 1.0. That would hurt. However, I do not believe that
JSL, in the last incarnation I used it, was that scary. It had rooms
for improvements, of course, but nothing that could not be a 1.0.

> But this a rather moot point, to me. I really don't care how many other
> users we have. I want JSL to be useable to *me*, and I'll work to make
> it that way. So, I don't really care if we call it "0.01" forever.

If you are Joe Average, then I think it is good enough that is is
usable for you. :-)

Me myself is very picky when it comes to user interface (and code, not
going to share my views on the state of the code as I saw it the last
time) and I also believe I have a way to take a step outside of myself
in order to figure out how things would benefit the general user. I
should probably dust off the old D-10 (if it still works) and help out
in the work and I really wish I had the time for it. But for now I
just have to do the talk.

Regards,

Roger