Re: "mc is over!?" - post by Ilia Maslakov

["Yury V. Zaytsev" <yury shurup com>]

On Thu, 2015-05-28 at 15:44 +0200, Adam Pribyl wrote:
> What is a surprise for me is, that this tool, which is already perfect
> in most directions, needs such a maintenance effort.. 

Consider a 20-years old code base of ~300 000 SLoC, written in a very
low-level language by modern standards (C) with stringent portability
requirements. Just a few facts: before Slava's team has started, the
code was still hosted it CVS, didn't have any indentation policy, had
zero tests and wasn't even being built regularly, and the list goes on
and on.

Still, there is a lot of refactoring that remains to be done, slimming
down the code base, making it more maintainable, fixing bugs and so on.
This is ungrateful work, because the users don't see any effect of it,
and it can easily consume hundreds of man-hours... On top of that, we
need to investigate and fix reported bugs, and integrate contributions
from the users.

At it's peak, the former team has been contributing more than 80 hours
per week to the project, and yet there were constant complains that
patches are not being processed fast enough. Having that said, I'm not
sure why people find my very moderate estimates so stunning...

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev