About writing new apps from scratch

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

Hi,

I think it is a waste of effort to start writing new apps from scratch, 
instead of improving the existing applications.

To give two examples:
- GNOME Music, instead of working on Rhythmbox or Banshee (or …);
- GNOME Photos, instead of working on eog or Shotwell (or …).

The existing applications have more features and a more mature code 
base. If the code is a bit old and have too many hacks, a better idea in 
my opinion is to improve the existing code, instead of starting a new 
project from scratch. And if old code are never cleaned up, the same 
problem will happen with the new applications in 10 years.

Creating a new design is nice, but if it means to rewrite applications 
from scratch, there is a problem somewhere. Unless there are good 
underlying libraries that do all the complicated work, and thus the 
application would be just the UI to glue together the different 
features.

So, what do you think? What are the reasons for GNOME Music and GNOME 
Photos? I want to better understand.

Best regards,
Sébastien