On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 10:12:55AM +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
cl@isbd.net wrote:
I think one of the things that can be difficult is the major difference in "shape/philosophy" between development in a Unix(ish) environment and a Windows(ish) one.
Yes, this is true, but not so much with a cross-platform OSS development where the philosophies have more in common.
I sort of realised you were somewhere 'in between', I just threw my comment in to add the the discussion really.
As I mentioned I did have the option of compiling under Linux; but when I looked at it I had exactly the same questions as under Windows (I still didn't know my way around SVN, wxWidgets, etc). I stuck with Windows mainly because I needed to test the final application under Windows, for other less enlightened folk in the family.
In some ways I think a bit of a significant learning curve may not be a bad idea. There needs to be some sort of level of competance before someone starts submitting code changes. I'm desperately trying not to sound elitist here! :-) I suppose it's akin to the problem of protecting Wikis from antisocial/incompetant people.
There's some truth in this, but what I'd want to do is lower the barrier, not necessarily remove it. I do a lot of PHP work and I'm only too aware of what can happen when everybody gets to program, but I think that a continuum from "user" to "programmer" is better than a big (and widening) gap between them.
Yes, I'll go with that!
After all we're not talking about lettinganybody make changes to the main codebase (which would be the Wiki parallel). Sure they can submit changes, but they'd need to be audited by the project's "owner". In the case of the accounts package I'm playing with, it (by the author's admission) isn't all great code, and many of the things I'm submitting back are just tidying and fixing the code. It can work both ways - its easy to assume that the code nobody can touch is really good code because of it, but I doubt that's true in practise (FOSS wouldn't work if it were!).
It's not a very popular job, tidying up code, I suspect it's rather more likely to happen with FOSS than with commercial software though. Which is another good reason for promoting FOSS.