my issues (was RE: [Pyblosxom-devel] Lucene and comments)

[will <wi...@bl...>]

Um, Theodore, did you read the thread from last week regarding the url
handling stuff I was working on that Wari asked you to read?


I'm seriously concerned right now.  I think there are way too many cooks 
with their hands in the soup who aren't bothering to coordinate with the 
other cooks.  I go on vacation for a few days and come back to find a 
flurry of development (which is fine) which (unless you guys are 
communicating off the list--which sucks for coordination) seems to be 
totally uncoordinated.


My basic problems with this project go like this:

1. there are no coding conventions--everyone's using their own style and 
the code base is a mess of several different styles which makes it 
difficult to figure out what's going on.

2. people aren't adequately documenting what they're doing.  this is both 
specifications that should be written to the devel list so we can discuss 
things BEFORE they happen as well as inline documentation in the code.

3. there are some fundamental architecture changes that need to be done.  
my first blush impression by looking at the checkin diffs over the last
week, we're duplicating functionality and calling it different names.


So what's the deal?  I definitely don't want to be involved if it's going 
to be this chaotic.  I'm totally not down with the "throw code together 
then discuss" method of doing things--I think it's an extremely poor 
development model which leads to a very large and unwieldy code-base with 
a lot of funkiness in edge-case scenarios.  It's not like we're inventing 
a totally new wheel here--many of the things we're discussing have been 
done over and over again in other projects.

I'll be honest--if this is the way you guys want this to work, then I 
can't be involved and I'll bow out.

/will


On Sun, 9 Feb 2003, Theodore W. Leung wrote:
> 
> Ok,
> 
> I've committed changes that make lucene work in a plugin style way.
> 
> I added a new kind of execute method to api.py, so that the executed
> handlers can return a list (in the case of lucene, a list of files).  I
> then added two new callback chains, one for CGI and another for the
> filelist.
> 
> When I added the callback chain for the filelist, I created a default
> plugin that contains the code for the standard blosxom file traversal.  
> I'm not sure that I like this approach because it puts the plugin
> directory back as required.  Seems like it might be better to have
> pyblosxom.py contain the code and somehow register it, but the plugin
> discovery mechanism (as it stands) precludes that.
> 
> Please let me know your thoughts on this.
> 
> I totally don't mind comments that say "this sucks".  Part of the reason
> I asked for feedback was that I didn't like it myself.
> 
> I'll be looking at comments next, but I need to do a little Java hacking
> the rest of today.
> 
> Ted