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Re: Ruby on Rails
by Eric Laffoon on Thursday 21/Apr/2005, @22:27
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This is less than strategic advocacy statement. I've used PHP since 2x and am moving to 5x and it is the most widely supported scripting language on the net today. However good Ruby may be it is absurd to suggest we change our focus. Think about it. Fortunately we were smarter than to design Quanta where we had to make such choices. Let's deal with facts. Quanta's support for PHP is NOT hardcoded. In fact it is part of our general parser. Support for other languages can be added by writing a Document Type Editing Package and if you collaborate with us we will tune the parser if we need to.
Having said all that my policy has always been that nobody works on features they don't actually use. My reasoning is simple. One key of FLOSS is that it scratches a developer's itch. When I try to guess where you itch odds are good I'll miss and end up with a mediocre result and we don't do mediocre. Since implementing support for languages is little more than XML and some Regexp, which we can help with, the question is if you are using Ruby on rails and why you aren't adding support? Well?
I realized early on that we would never be able to cover the diversity of needs in the community so I specified that Quanta should be user extensible. It is frustrating that somehow people fail to get the point that asking others to do more and more just because they want it is NOT how FLOSS started and not how it will grow.
Andras very politely said someone needs to step up. I will be a little more blunt. If you want to see a more feature rich program we will need less people saying "you should do such and such" and more people getting off their ass and saying "I want to help add this feature into your framework". My personal efforts have absorbed enough time to force me to put up a virtual barrier to sucking more time out of my business and with donations in 2005 running 1/3 as many as in 2004 and one less major sponsor I'm looking at thousands of dollars out of my own pocket for the project this year. I look at community like jury duty. Sometimes you have to step forward to make sure something happens. It's getting tiring that seemingly very close to 99.9% of people in the community seem to see work to make things happen as something somebody else should do more of. There are limits to what a few people can give of themselves.
I'm happy to make our project address everyone's wishes, but it would be nice to get a little help doing it. Instead of suggesting we drop work on what we use maybe somebody else could drop some of their free time for a few weeks and help? |
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