[dev] [commits] Horde branch master updated. bc5b08ba9bd5b3a0f85bb81687c44c14deee3e89

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Jan Schneider <jan at horde.org>:

> Zitat von Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at horde.org>:
>
>> But I have other things to fight about.  But whatever we do, we  
>> have to make sure that the channel-discover line is not wrapped on  
>> 80-column displays, unlike before.
>
> I already didn't understand this the first time. How is that an  
> issue, beside that it doesn't "look good"? In the website version  
> this is not an issue, and if you copy and paste it from the console,  
> there will be no line breaking in the copied code. I think that's a  
> moot point and since this seems to be the driving issue for you we  
> should simply revert to the old path.

Because it looks very unprofessional.  One of the ways we stand-out  
compared with other projects is the detail and presentation of our  
product.  Going through the INSTALL file, this was an example that,  
quite frankly, looked like it didn't belong (same thing with a  
prominent TODO in the DB section.  Stuff like this just makes it look  
like the project is half-complete.  TODOs need to stay out of  
user-specific documentation).

And this isn't just some BS, hypothetical complaint.  Within the last  
2 weeks, there have been two separate occasions where I rejected using  
code from a project because either the installation documentation was  
filled with unwrapped lines and extra spaces, or the code organization  
was just a mess.  Code that looks like that indicates that it may not  
be of the highest quality.  At a minimum, with nothing else to go on,  
this can be a deal-breaker.

> And by the way, for most users is *is* as simple as dropping Horde  
> into a directory, and we've been working hard to get to this point.  
> Also, and I think we made this clear by now, even though /var/www  
> might not mean anything to you, it does for a good majority of  
> administrators.

Except this won't work for the majority of installations since in many  
cases, PHP needs to be reinstalled.  E.g. debian, who AFAICT ships PHP  
compiled against libxml 2.6.  Which will break a bunch of stuff in IMP  
(not to mention it apparently comes pre-installed with suhosin...)

I personally think this is dangerous.  Web applications by design are  
not intended to be able to be dropped-in.  There are WAY too many  
performance and security considerations that we, as a project, can not  
design around.  So I believe moving towards a copy/paste,  
follow-the-numbers type installation should NOT be a critical design  
goal.

michael

___________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at horde.org]