Bob S wrote:
Don't let me down now here folks. Sven Burmeister says that KDE3 was broken. Regardless of whether you use KDE3 or KDE4, let's vote on the issue.
If I am wrong I will forever keep my mouth shut.
I vote NO it was not broken.
I vote "of _course_ it was broken". Any non-trivial software is broken to some degree, in some places. Now, for a more realistic argument; kde up through 3 was designed in the earliest days of object-oriented programming, and its design shows the primitive understanding of its day (so I understand from reading this and other fora; I'm not a kde developer. Was it even designed according to object-oriented principles?). Notwithstanding Bob S's sneer, a program that is designed well from the start will never need rewriting unless it becomes obsolete. kde3 did not become obsolete: it became unmanageable, as you said. kde was maybe designed to the best standards of its day, but if so, those standards were not very good. Would any of the kde developers comment on the quality or the standards of the original design? I imagine that, like most large projects, no matter how good the originators were, their successors were less good, or maybe just different. Either would corrupt an otherwise good system. Even a very bad program can look good to end users (speaking from experience here) with enough palliatives and veneer to cover up the faults, and enough disabled code to keep it from hitting something unfortunate and crashing. I've done things like this myself; there's just not enough time in our lives to go back and redo everything right. Could kde people comment on how much kde suffered from palliatives, veneer, and disabled code? Now, I don't know personally about the brokenness of kde; I can only listen to the people who really know it. If they couldn't bear to struggle through any more of covering up mistakes, jumping around dead code, and maybe even trying to thread their way through antique spaghetti code, they obviously believed it was broken. I -- and you -- have no right to second-guess them without putting in our oar and contributing in a _substantive_ manner. John Perry -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org