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

[Jan Schneider]

Zitat von Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at horde.org>:

> 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.

Unfortunately you can't even run the test script of Horde if you  
haven't configured Horde yet. Since its purpose is to show missing  
prerequisites, this has to be fixed. Also, the test script was always  
designed so that admins can't break it through configuration, so that  
they always have a single point to check if everything else fails.  
This has to be fixed again.

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

I agree. We should try to find a good balance, but code consolidation  
and easier bootstrapping of applications has a very high weight, and  
you have done a great job on that recently!

Jan.

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