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In lugnet.cad.dev, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> In lugnet.cad.dev, Jeremy H. Sproat writes:
> > The thing is, there's a bottleneck here because one or several people don't
> > have the time to push the update system changes through. This is
> > understandable and perfectly fine, given the volunteer nature of LDraw.
> > Offload that time onto the end-users, then.
> How does that help? That is, suppose it would take 40 man hours of work to
> resolve the bottleneck and get the new process on line and running. If that
> 40 hours avoids 400 or 4000 hours of user effort, isn't it worth it for the
> users to wait?
The bugger here is that we could play what-if with the schedule all year
long. I won't do that.
> Maybe you are saying let the users decide for themselves?
Why not? Aren't the users why the whole LDraw thing happens, anyway?
> Would you be willing to volunteer to help get the new process fixed?
I would, but only to get it done my way -- quick & cheap & dirty. I doubt
that would go over very well with the LDraw Powers...
> Conversely, you said that it was OK that users have to go to extra effort to
> get parts. Right now, the extra effort every user goes through is to search
> the entire newsgroup for the dat file. Would you be willing to go find 10,
> and put them on a community updateable resource, if everyone else that was
> complaining about the bottleneck also went and found 10 different ones and
> posted them to the same resource too? Maybe that would BE your 'interim update'
I could already do that now. Why should anyone have to search the
newsgroups for DAT files if they've already been collected?
Or perhaps that's the problem. Have they been collected? Or have they been
only partially collected? And if that is the case, where did the collection
stop?
> If not, what did you mean about not wanting an officialy
> packaged/installeable update, exactly?
An unofficial update shouldn't be "installable"; that is, it should not be
as easy to snarf as an official update. I gave some (IMO) very good reasons
in my post before. To summarize:
a) it should take more effort to install since the greater effort is
remembered more by the end-user
b) it should take more effort to install in order to reflect the greater
risk of bad parts
c) people who want to take the greater risk with preview pieces should take
a similar responsibility for their preview-philic actions, and therefore be
familiar enough with LDraw to recover from a bad piece, and therefore be
familiar with LDraw enough to install new primitives as well as new parts
d) packaging unofficial pieces with ARJ or LHA or ZIP or whatever, in the
exact same format as official updates, takes more time than just putting the
files out there
e) people looking for parts in the preview set probably won't want the
entire set all at once
f) (and this one is new) recovering from the whole set of preview parts is
much more difficult for the end-user than recovering from a small handful of
preview parts
> I am just brainstorming (and this may generate me some flame mail too, I dunno)
I like my solution -- just put them out there for download with a
disclaimer. It's the simplest in terms of work on the maintainer's end, and
enforces a certain level of competency on the end-user's part.
Any solution that takes the least amount of time & effort with the maximum
amount of exposure for preview parts would be good, however. As long as
something is done to get the parts out.
> I have seen previews of the new system and it will be very very
> nice once it is done.
I'm sure it will be. But it hasn't been available, and won't be until it's
done, and it's blocking the new parts until it is done.
This, BTW, is the one of the top problems in the software industry, and one
which you should be very familiar with. I don't know what to call it, but
it's somewhat related to crepping featuritis, and can turn a very good piece
of software into vaporware.
Cheers,
- jsproat
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