Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Maintainership, and whiners...

[Bruce Stephens]

Andrew Suffield <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> Exactly what I said. Gross duplication of work and yet not *one* of
> them is vaguely feature complete. No less than six different groups,
> and probably more, have implemented the same thing and done it
> differently badly every time. That indicates something is very
> broken here.

Yes, something's broken.  My sense is that there's enough design space
for half a dozen projects (in that about half a dozen seem different
enough that it's hard to imagine merger), and much of that design
choice flows through to the user: using baz feels different to using
darcs which feels different to monotone.

I guess I want to believe that in a year or two things will have
settled down and everyone will agree on the dimensions where variation
makes sense, and there'll be a handful of good programs covering them.
(Then I see yet another lightweight text editing component with source
highlighting announced on freshmeat, or another make replacement with
automatic C/C++ include dependency checking which uses (shock!) a
scripting language.  Or yet another almost plain-text document format
that can be converted to HTML, PDF, manpages, etc.)

[...]