Re: IDE

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

David Engster <deng@randomsample.de> writes:

> Dmitry Gutov writes:
>>> Well, it's not like a bunch of people are hacking on the C
>>> parser. Several things happened:
>>
>> It's not like I'm blaming anyone, really. But it leaves an impression
>> of CEDET being more of a research project.
>
> It leaves the impression of an understaffed project.

Which is the rule rather than the exception for Free Software projects.
Even when done under corporate veil, the expectation for Free Software
(partly due to the claims of the Open Source movement) is very much that
many people may pitch in.

Most projects are neither prepared to deal with significantly fewer
people pitching in than expected (the more likely case) as they are for
significantly more people pitching in.

The key provision for either possibility is a modular architecture where
people can work on multiple fronts without either depending too much on
each other for their individual progress, nor getting in each other's
hair.

I think that if CEDET fell apart into more independently accessible,
usable, and changeable parts, it might gather more buy-in on its
independent components.  Of course, having a separate repository that
has diverged from the versions in upstream Emacs does not exactly help
with having contributors become active on just their favorite parts of
it.

-- 
David Kastrup