2009/2/10 Michael DeHaan <mdehaan(a)redhat.com>:
(Apologies on the quoting, using the mail reader web app)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Max Spevack" <mspevack(a)redhat.com>
To: ekg(a)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.
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.
-Yaakov