Gautam,
This won’t be a short post, but I truly wish for you to know this comes from a place of respect and admiration for both your code and your commitment to bbPress and it’s community.
Please, let us focus on what we need to get the next release finished.
We simply cannot fix everything.
We have to prioritise.
Matt, who is the project lead, did the prioritising for us.
- Critical Bug fixes
- Email notifications
- Anonymous posting.
That’s it. Once those are ready, we release.
Matt himself said that the focus should not be on bugs, but on the 2 new features and critical only bugs.
It’s not for me to tell you, nor even ask, what you should be working on; but please allow me to help you. As a developer, and someone who loves this project, you are trying your best to solve as many problems as possible. It is so admirable, and we all appreciate your efforts. But in the long run, you are only going to slow us down. How?
Bugs.
When a developer writes code, especially large pieces of code, there are bugs. It is the nature of the beast. We have very very few testers, very very few people who download the latest trunk version to test. The chances of us catching anything but the most obvious of bugs are slim.
Take the new default Kakumei theme you’ve included. While I’m in total agreement that the default theme needs changing, this is not the way forward. You’ve changed about 400 lines of code, and there will be bugs. Given that a new Kakumei theme isn’t part of the feature list, those bugs are going to count against us, not be a positive.
You’re giving theme developers slighty more tools to work with, but all you’re giving the average user and the new users is an untested theme that looks like the old one (which looks crap still).
Regardless of how awesome your code is, and it looks brilliant, the best we can hope for with it is that it doesn’t go badly. If it works flawlessly, no-one will notice. There is no winning scenario here. No part of releasing a new theme in 1.1 will be beneficial, especially as it looks identical to the old one.
Sadly the same can be said for your efforts to totally rewrite the entire tag system. I’ve absolutely no doubt, 100%, that your code and functionality would be amazing. But right now, it works. Same for your Mass Delete / User handling functionality. etc etc
There comes a time when Less is More.
Less code changes means less new bugs, means less “OMG it’s taken a year to come out and it’s still terrible” posts. Less code means less to test, it might mean more bugs are caught, it means less bugs released. Less code means we can release quicker. Less code means less testing time.
Realistically, we have only 2 bugs in 1.0.3 ( #1228, #1276 ) and 2 bugs in 1.1 ( #1244, #1268 ) that are stopping us from releasing this thing to alpha for testing. Thats great work, even if #1244 looks like it will be a lot of work.
The other bugs (#538, #1183, #1277, #1243 ) are all “nice to haves”, and yet somehow contain about 800-1000 lines of code with changes. There has to be some form of Risk Assesment here bro. 1000 lines of code changed with no functionality to forum users, but instead increases the chances of bugs?? Risky, very risky.
Look, BackPress might never include the fix we need to get this thing working, so lets focus on the outstanding bugs that are blocking us, and lets worry about the others after. Because lets be honest, if we’re building a new theme for bbPress, it’s should look nothing like KAKumei (emphasis on KAK)
