Re: some thoughts..

[robert havoc pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 6 May 1998, Kenneth R. Kinder wrote:
> 
> I disagree; resource usage IS major concern.  No one wants to "pull a 
> microsoft" (bloat software) here.  Personally, I'd put memory over CPU or 
> hard disk usage, so I'd be in favor of a large, but very modular file 
> manager.
> 

It ain't a major concern when the file manager already has near-100%
functionality, and is only 800K; when some hyper-modular do-everything
wonder program would be vaporware forever; when there are already a
zillion Linux file managers, some of them quite tiny. I also don't see how
it makes any sense to make the file manager a web browser when we already
have a help browser and Gnomified Mozilla.

This is a project to have a working, easy-to-use system in a reasonable
amount of time. hyper-size-optimization when size isn't even a problem is
not going to help. There are many more important things on the TODO list
than re-writing Miguel's perfectly good file manager.

Don't worry, there is no danger of Microsoft-style bloat. There probably
is a danger of not getting a working system in time to compete with other
platforms, or not making the system easy enough to use.

I don't mean to snap at you in particular, it just seems that every other
day someone posts saying "I don't want to run this program" "Isn't the
Help bloat? I don't need help, I'm too manly" etc. If you want
functionality, you have to run software. Software uses resources. Everyone
is doing their best to minimize resource use, while preserving
functionality; there's no need to remind them to do it all the time. 

My $.03. Input is appreciated, by the way, and I'm also guilty of giving
it all out of proportion to my code contributions (my contributions are
kind of lame even when they exist) - I just don't think this particular
topic is productive, FWIW. Let's talk about something else.

Havoc Pennington
http://pobox.com/~hp