[Debian-eeepc-devel] How to deal with the freeze?

[Ben Armstrong]

On 13/11/10 08:38 PM, Cristian Ionescu-Idbohrn wrote:
> Priorities?  Subgoal, goal, not a goal, ignorance?

Yes, subgoal, not *the* goal. Will you read our home page again, please?
Our goal is to make things "just work" on the Eee PC.  The rest are
subgoals.

To say something is a subgoal is not to say that it is unimportant, but
simply that it must be thought about second when pursuing the primary goal.

> On Mon, 8 Nov 2010, Ben Armstrong wrote:
>>
>> I agree the alternative above is atrocious
> 
> won't take you very far.  It's ignorant, the way I see it :(

It offended my aesthetics. I will be the first to admit that I have
written code in perl, python and ruby before, and have probably written
many more lines in these languages than I ever have in shell.
Particularly with respect to the latter, I am inclined to be attracted
to very concise code and repelled by very verbose code, dense with
punctuation that does the same thing. So there you are: my bias (or
ignorance, as you call it,) laid out plainly. You can castigate me now
for using such inefficent languages in the first place. Whatever floats
your boat.

That being said, I was making a project-level decision, not a technical
decision, in calling for an end to the discussion. I felt we were
getting away from focusing our energy on our primary goal as a project,
and could set aside the technical issue for another time. I deemed that
the code committed was "good enough" and wanted to move on. I have
already apologized for drawing the conversation to a close too quickly,
and have now proposed an alternative that you have dismissively
addressed and instead chosen to engage me in debate. What more
appeasement do you want? Sack-cloth and ashes?

>> Since every change we make now is in the middle of the freeze, we're
>> operating on borrowed time.
> 
> Are we?

We are indeed. Each day diminishes our chance of getting a freeze
exception made. And the most important issue to address in requesting
such an exception is: "does the code work?" (and I'm not yet sure it all
does), not: "how many fractions of a second are spent processing each
hotkey press?"

> I did point out inefficiencies with the shell script code in more
> than one post, didn't I?  You chose to ignore that :(  And now it's too
> late?  Well, allow me to express my disappointment.

Months ago when the impending release still seemed far off. And when
this thread started, I had forgotten that discussion. Sorry about that.
Later, when I had time to do it, after I read what you wrote about
performance, I did hazily recall you had raised similar points before,
so I went back over the archives and considered it again. Still, I did
not have any constructive technical contributions to add to the
conversation at that time, not to mention your abrasive rebuttal, so I
set the problem aside for a few days. Fortuitously, while trying to
solve the latest round of issues, I saw a way that would satisfy my
desire to keep the code as concise as possible and your desire to help
us make the code more efficient both at once.

So, I'm still waiting for constructive criticism of my proposed
solution. Can we move forward?

Ben