Brett Bonfield writes
> I think Jonathan and Nicole nailed it with community health,
I beg to differ.
If you requiree a healthy community to start working with a piece of
software, how do you want a grassroots project to start? Obviously a
small project will start with one or two developers, and it won't
grow, until a few people work with it despite the fact that it's a
small thing to start with.
Requiring an upfront healthy community is particurly problematic is
a small community such as digital library work.
On the other kind, there is widely adopted software that I got
cajoled into maintaining, that consider bad. Apache is one of
them. I run maybe 50 virtual servers an a bunch of boxes, I am still
puzzled how it works and it's trial and error with each software
upgrade, where goes that NameVirtualServer thing into, the constant
croaks "server foo has no virtualserver". I'm not a dunce, but
Apache makes me feel I am one. When I look at these config files
that are half-baked XML, I wonder what weed the guy smoked who
invented this.
If I could do it allover again, I would do it in lighttpd. Oh well
it was not there in 1995 where I started running web servers.
Other problematic case: Mailman. I run about 130 mailing lists, over
80 have a non-standard config, I am running every few months into
problems with onne of them, despite the fact that I wrote a script
to configure all the non-standard lists the same way.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel
http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1
skype: thomaskrichel
