Yaakov Nemoy wrote:
2009/2/10 Michael DeHaan mdehaan@redhat.com:
(Apologies on the quoting, using the mail reader web app)
----- Original Message ----- From: "Max Spevack" mspevack@redhat.com To: ekg@lists.fedorahosted.org Sent: Monday, February 9, 2009 11:39:10 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: summary of FOSDEM ekg discussion
Yaakov and I spoke about EKG at FOSDEM.
I'll let him lay out some of the roadmap/feature stuff we talked about, but I want to propose a larger question to the list, and especially to Michael:
The first item on the agenda was "is Ruby really the language that is going to make this project accessible to a wider number of contributors, and most maintainable for the future?" followed by "if we have a clear list of enhancements and/or new features, we should decide if Ruby or Python is this project's future before we write them."
[MPD] I see no reason to not let a v3 be Python if folks feel better with this, though I also personally distaste language wars and see that being a waste of time to express preferences. If allow someone to say Python > Ruby I also allow someone to say, let's port it to Java/Mono, in which case I will want to hurt small furry animals. Ruby is more than capable.
Yes, let's. Actually, no. Seriously, Ruby's a great language, but that's not the best reason to use it. Perl is also very good at text processing the exact same way that Ruby is also good at it. That said, i also need a good database modeling system, and my short list for good database interfaces is very short. There's only one system on it, and it's not Ruby based.
I need not site the full explanation, do I?
Ruby is good at text processing and also has a non-sucky OO module and can be written in ways that are not as idiomatic.
ActiveRecord also works plenty well.
So, in short:
Michael, how much of your own personal time do you see yourself devoting to EKG in the next 3 months? I say 3 months, because that is the timeline for development that I want to work on in order to have EKG meet the CommArch team's goals. Do you still see yourself as the lead developer of this project, or is it up to CommArch to find the engineering resources (which for the moment will be Yaakov) to take this project further?
[MPD] Cobbler's sucking up all of my time. I'd still like to have some sort of involvement in terms of ideas and advice/leadership, but I really would like to see us find more resources to work on it and not depend on me.
Feel free to participate in the mailing list discussions then. :). I won't keep you out.
And somewhat separate from that question, is it worth spending (at Yaakov's estimation) 10 days or so to rewrite the core of the code into Python, setting it up for a better future?
[MPD] I disagree that this makes the future any better. Ruby is superior at text processing (better regex module), for instance. What other things do we need that Ruby doesn't have? Not much.
It doesn't make the future 'better'. It makes my job easier and better. Max needs me to get some results for a bunch of pointy haired people who cut multi digit checks quite often. A significant bit of the graphing relies on database processing and not text processing.
The real question though, is not if Ruby is a better language. It's a question of what i'm better at.
Fair enough, you're doing the work -- just don't lose any existing features in the port while you're throwing code away.
You'll also have to write the gchart stuff or use a Python analog.
-Yaakov _______________________________________________ ekg mailing list ekg@lists.fedorahosted.org https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/ekg