----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Milner" steve@gnulinux.net To: "Community health scanner" ekg@lists.fedorahosted.org Sent: Monday, February 9, 2009 5:37:43 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: summary of FOSDEM ekg discussion
Disclaimer: I like Python a lot .... a WHOLE lot ...
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Max Spevack mspevack@redhat.com wrote:
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."
A lot of things in the Fedora community are done in Python so moving to Python could bring in some other folks who don't know (or rather not do) Ruby.
As for maintainability, that is more so on how the code is implemented IMHO and what the languages provide ... so one isn't really better than the other one.
[MPD] It's true we do have more folks that prefer Python. I personally prefer Python for /some/ things, though text processing is not one of them. What we are doing is really rather simple, so a port doesn't achieve much at all. However I'm not going to try to stop that rewrite from happening if that's what is holding people back from trying to get involved; personally I would hope that any simple dynamic language would be ok as long as we don't introduce complex architecture -- which could happen anywhere regardless of language choice. I am always suspicious of rewrites for sake of language.
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?
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?
For our community Python will probably open the door up for more people to contribute ... for people outside our community I think either language will do.
[MPD] And knowing more than one language and the differences between them is good for your health. I think if that means we package a few more Ruby modules in Fedora, that's goodness that helps out Fedora as a ecosystem for Rails developers.
--Max _______________________________________________ ekg mailing list ekg@lists.fedorahosted.org https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/ekg
What is the language skills of those who contribute? Obviously there is some level of a Ruby language base ... what would people rather write in given the choice? For me I favour Python over Ruby ... but Ruby more than most other languages. _______________________________________________ ekg mailing list ekg@lists.fedorahosted.org https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/ekg