"Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde> wrote in message
news:3dac5b05$1@news.povray.org...
...
> Well, I am just not sure it is a good idea at all.  Or better, I should
say
> I was not sure if it is a good idea because of the possible flames and
such
> that would be the result.  So I made a test (see the thread "Proposal for
> 4.0 core control" and my posts in there).  Now I am not sure if there are
> many people even familiar enough with the core code to participate in any
> such discussion.  Not really conclusive results at all :-(

Forgive the essay:

Concerning flames, take the Linux Kernel Mailing List as an example, heated
discussions and unresolvable differences of opinion are not uncommon, but
outright flaming is. Overall I think the community here in these groups is
relatively close and supportive when compared with many other online fora,
and I don't see that opening dev discussion would be likely to disrupt that.
Since, according to Chris Huff, the team is still "hoping to use a much more
open development model for POV 4" I assume you mean it is not a good idea to
open dev discussions _at this time_ (it is hard to imagine open development
without open dev discussion at some point). I think by opening discussion
early (even if read-only for the general public at first) you head off a
great deal of the possible flamage by giving people a chance to understand
the motivations behind design decisions, rather than just saying "Here's
what we decided" and risking the response "That's stupid, why the hell did
you do that? Furthermore, you smell".
Certainly, your test does show that no-one was particularly familiar with
that aspect of the code, but I do not believe that familiarity with _every_
aspect of a program should be a prerequisite for participation in
development discussion. The lack of flaming in your test may also show that
when people in this community are not familiar with an aspect of the
program, they tend not to go spouting off about it, which is good: People
may get passionate and heated about aspects that fall within their sphere of
interest, but they know when to shut up too. Further, I would think that the
community of potential developers' lack of knowledge about the core code
would be good a reason to open dev discussion, not to keep it closed.
That no-one responded to your 'interesting' suggestions seems likely to be a
combination of the fact that not many people are particularly interested or
familiar with the area being discussed, and as Edmund Horner described, a
case of "the Emperor's new clothes": people saw one of the four primary
developers of 3.5 and thought 'well, he must know what he's talking about'.
Most people are going to treat your opinions with more weight than those of
most others.

In responding to Christoph Hormann you wrote:
> I don't want to have to answer the (as I expect it)
> resulting misunderstandings for the next half decade ... the problem is we
> can't keep the usual group of general users from reading such public
> discussions and getting completely misdirected :-(  No matter how big the
> disclaimers ;-)

I really don't see this as a big problem, I think most people in the POV
community are smart enough to understand that a dev group would be just
that, a place for developers to come together and discuss ideas and
possibilities as well as concrete plans. If you want to make it absolutely
clear what is and is not planned you could publish a design document online,
complete with a list of all functionality planned for the initial release, a
class dictionary, class diagrams, possibilities for future expansion,
testing plans etc. then adding a formal POV-SDL specification, API
specifications and so on. I'm only part serious here, I do think a design
document would be a good idea, but I understand that most people find them
_extremely_ tedious.

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