On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Chris Cormack <chris@bigballofwax.co.nz> wrote:
Wow, how defensive we developers are. I don't think this is defensive, it's pragmatic. Brooke is making valid points to be sure--this project isn't perfect--but it's very important to understand that there are reasons for the problems we face. In particular, we have a real dearth of development resources relative to the number of Koha users.
I think its worth acknowledging that Brooke has made some valid points. That we do need to be careful that we make Koha usable for as many people as possible. And while Joshua is right we mostly have to code what the libraries are asking for we should be careful we don't undo what other libraries have already paid for also.
If something is broke, lets fix it. Lets not just throw features out. I completely agree, we should strive to fix broken code, but sometimes we're forced to throw out completely broken stuff and start over. Just to be clear, if a report or feature causes the whole of Koha to lock up if you've got more than 10,000 records, any RM worth their salt will need to either fix it or remove it. If we had a swell of volunteer developers doing free work on Koha in their spare time I'd expect this kind of thing would get worked out on its own, but the fact is, more than 90% of Koha development is done by developers who work for specific customers and we're very strapped for resources, and we have to focus on coding stuff that customers that are paying our bills.
I don't think any developer who's looked at the code will argue that the NOMARC stuff could have been preserved in 3.0 without a serious investment in development time (hundreds of hours). As the RM, I certainly did my best to make 3.0 as backwards compatible as possible, but the fact is, I had to draw the line somewhere. As it is, I was heavily criticized for how long it took for 3.0 to get out the door. I'd be very interested in hearing any suggestions from users like Brooke for how we could address this resource problem and make sure that we have enough resources in the community to make sure that the needs of libraries that can't afford to pay for development are still met. Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE CEO migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS