Re: GnuCash page on GO site

[Derek Atkins <warlord MIT EDU>]

Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org> writes:

> On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 15:04, Derek Atkins wrote:
>> I'm still not sure what this means, exactly, but synnergy is always
>> a good thing (so long as it doesn't add dependencies ;)
>
> Surely it depends upon the dependency!?

Maybe..

> Some dependencies are smart - when it is a well designed, well
> maintained, well used, portable library like libgsf or Gnome-DB.

Size doesn't matter.  It's the sheer count that's absolutely
absurd.  For example, why does libgal exist?  Why isn't it part
of libgtk or libglib?  Same question with pango.. atk..

I agree that adding a dependency that provides a useful feature
is important, but you also need to make sure that dependency
is easily accessible to your end users.  I don't expect my users
to keep up with gnome-CVS.

Case in point:  when gnucash-1.6 was released it had a dependency
on gnome-1.4.  At the time, the only way to get gnome-1.4 was to
run Debian/unstable or built it ALL yourself.  What a PITA!
Users were complaining for months, no, YEARS, about how hard
it was to pull down all the dependencies.  We still get complaints
about it, but not as many.

We made sure not to make that same mistake with 1.8.

Dependencies are fine when you can assume your user already has it
installed.  Problems arrise when that assumption fails.  Me, I'm
conservative in that manner and would rather err on the side of
caution and provide a good user experience (which starts when they
download the tarball and read how many damn other libraries they have
to build!).

So, surely you can understand that a hard-to-build application gets
fewer users, and it's the user-base that makes an application
worthwhile.

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord MIT EDU                        PGP key available