[sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar

[Michael Stone]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 08:31:24PM -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
> Michael Stone wrote:
> | 5) Sugar is built on technologies that incentivize its developers to
> | recompute prior results which could be cached across boots.
>
> Sugar was intended to write to disk absolutely as little as possible, and
> also to reboot as infrequently as possible. 

Interesting. Do you think that these remain worthy design goals?

> Regarding the majority of your points, I would say:  Sugar has been, and
> continues to be, in a constant rush just to implement the desired
> functionality, regardless of efficiency. The question has long been
> "how can we code this as fast as possible", not "what is the ideal way
> to implement this".  

In my opinion, this is a missed opportunity. (see below).

> I think that is a good thing.  

I disagree because I think that the approach we have taken has made it
much harder for others to help us. For a project like Sugar, this
ultimately results is less software of less quality in the same
timeframe. At least, that's what I take away from the Trac and xmonad
examples. (When you examine your own "notoriously easy-to-contribute-to
projects", do your conclusions match mine?)

> I think we will need retain this mindset through 9.1, in order to
> finally deliver a Sugar that has the features required for usability.

In my opinion, 9.1 is unlikely to contain the features and quality
required for the level of usability Sugar was sold on. (It will be
substantially better than 8.2, but we set the initial goal REALLY high.)

Regards,

Michael