Re: [Chicken-hackers] chicken repo (intentionally) gone

[Brandon Van Every]

On 8/15/07, Thomas Christian Chust <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> the fact that a software package is widely used or that there are few
> good alternatives for it doesn't say much about its quality.

What do you want, the moon?  There's IE7, Opera, Netscape, Firefox,
Safari, and god knows what else.  Clearly the browser space is highly
competitive.  A lot of people think that Firefox is the reason the
browser space became competitive, after a long lack of interest from
Microsoft.  If the plethora of alternatives aren't "good" as far as
you're concerned, then by all means, take the open source code and
make something better, or write your own better browser from scratch.
But be advised that rewriting from scratch is what killed Netscape.
It is considered one of the classic engineering blunders, to rewrite
something that large from scratch.

> I use a Mozilla browser and I think it is a decent piece of software as
> far as the end user experience is concerned. But every time I take a
> look at the C++ code of Mozilla, I feel an immediate urge to delete it
> from both my harddisk and my memory ;-)

This is irrelevant to the revision control system.  All you need to
know about Mozilla is it's a 400MB source tree with thousands upon
thousands of developers all over the world.  Mozilla chose Mercurial
to handle that task amongst all available options.  I'm sorry, I'm
simply not going to accept that the Mozilla devs are incompetent just
because nobody likes looking at other people's ugly C++ code.  Any of
you should be thankful to have the kind of success in your own careers
that Mozilla has had so far.

When Mozilla starts declaring that picking Mercurial was a mistake,
then I'll start believing that Mercurial isn't so hot after all.

For a project the size of Chicken, Mercurial is clearly fine if it
improves on Darcs' speed, reliability, and bootability.  I don't know
if it actually does; I'm sure Felix will tell us in due course.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every