Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1702 mails)

["John E. Perry" <j.e.perry@xxxxxxx>]

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


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