Re: debian-lex

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

On Tue, 10 Mar 2009, ter wrote:

> In defense of "one man" or "one woman" shows - they could yield that
> catalyst we are looking for. If that one man has persisted for the last
> 5 years, maybe there is value in his scratching, even if he were to lose
> the itch. It's a FOSS strength to reuse his work even after he leaves.

Sure.  I did not wanted to say that a single person can not write
very useful code.  I mean that there are projects hanging around which
were not picked up for a reason.  So checking how long a project
existed and when the last commits were done is a really good idea.
If nothing happened for a long time just look twice on the code
before you spend a lot of effort into the project.

> As you said, this happens frequently in "special fields".

The rationale behind it is that you have in "main stream software"
(in contrast to special fields), for instance web browsers, office
suites, desktop GUIs you have kind of an evolutionary process.  There
are some main competitors and many contributors.  In most cases you
find 2 or three really good products which more or less fit your
taste.

If it is about specialised software quite frequently the existence of
"competing" projects is based on a lack of research in the internet
whether the product I might need is available to some extend as
Free SOftware or the protagonists are unable to settle down to a
common technique or whatever.

> I think
> debian-lex is a hard problem because it is trying to coalesce a bunch of
> "special fields", which in this case are layers of bureaucratic
> practices on top of myriad legal systems on top of many languages.

Yes.  I perfectly agree.

Kind regards

    Andreas.

--
http://fam-tille.de