[dev] [commits] Horde-Hatchery branch master updated. d3fcd5cdd11ada51d44c03fccd529ba9beed543d

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>:

> Quoting Jan Schneider <jan at horde.org>:
>
>>> I absolutely do NOT want to cater to the tiny fraction of people  
>>> that may download imp (for example), extract it in a  
>>> web-accessible directory, point their browser at that directory,  
>>> and then get errors that various horde core libraries/paths can  
>>> not be found.  If these people can not take the 5 seconds to read  
>>> INSTALL, they don't deserve to run the software.  Period.  We (as  
>>> devs) have much better things to focus on.
>>
>> Who was saying that? This never worked in any version, and we of  
>> course we can't help people that don't read installation  
>> instructions.
>
> I am tremendously sympathetic to this point of view. But the simple  
> fact is that not having at LEAST a friendly "you need to finish your  
> installation, here's how" screen hurts us by turning away people who  
> are in a hurry, trying a bunch of solutions, etc. And that impacts  
> the user community size and thus the developer community size.

I'm not against the idea of useful error messages at all.  What I *am*  
against is duplicating identical code among all applications.  One of  
the single biggest nightmares of maintaining H3 and the main reason I  
have been working to consolidate this kind of stuff in Horde (i.e.  
test scripts, Horde_Registry::appInit()).  The downside is - in a  
COMPLETELY broken installation, there may not be the same level of  
feedback as before - e.g., you have to setup Horde properly before you  
can run test scripts on individual apps.

But this is not a sufficient argument to outweigh the benefits of code  
consolidation.

michael

-- 
___________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at horde.org]