Re: Moving forward

[Aaron Turner <aturner@linuxkb.org>]

On Sun, 4 Jun 2000, Robert Myers wrote:

> I just got a chance to speak with Jason about the LKB.
> 
> Could someone please enlighten me about the decision to dump all you have
> worked on, all Jay has worked on for so long, to go with something else?

I'm a bit confused... didn't Jason tell you?
 
> I am totally lost on this.  What you had was working fine, and if you ran
> into some road blocks, those  features that were causing problems could
> have been put on the back burner until a later date.
> 
> Please advise.

Well I guess I'll give a go of it.  First, I was the one who wrote the
Moving Forward document now running on www.linuxkb.org.  It was however
reviewed repeatedly by Jason, Daniel, Marc, and Pete.  I think it
does a good job of explaining why, but let me go into a bit more detail:

The reason for trashing the current site and code boils down to one basic
problem: scaleability.

The code was not scaling in terms of modularity and performance.
functions.php3 was almost 1,500 lines of code, was poorly commented, and
difficult to manage.  Furthermore, a key function which is a part of
nearly every page had a 7-8sec runtime on a PIII-733Mhz.  Our analysis of
the problem indicated that it was a problem with PHP itself- optimizing
the code would have little effect.  Moving to PHP4 did not look like it
would resolve the performance problem completely and it would have no
effect on the modularity issue.

And the modularity of the code was causing Jason tremendous problems with
fixing bugs.  It also made it nearly impossible for anyone other than
Jason to actually work on the code.  Frankly, nobody but Jason really
understands the code though I know you and Daniel understand parts of it.
Not to mention, nearly impossible to add any more developers to the
project in the future.

Which brings us to the decision to bag it all.  Basically, we (Jason
really) could fix the bugs and add some basic functionality in about 2
months.  It would not however fix the 7-8sec execution per page; which
would render the site basically unuseable, nor did we have a real solution
for this without *major* code re-write which would take significantly
longer.

Jason has for a long time wanted to re-write the backend using CORBA, and
we decided that we could either start on this now or wait a few more
months.  After looking at our options, it appeared that waiting any
further would be wasting our time on "dead code".  I want to make it clear
that Jason, Daniel, and I were all in agreement in this and everyone had
took a few days to think it over before we decided on a course of action.

It also has another major benifit- OODS is applicable to a lot more
projects than just the LKB.  This means we should find it significanly
easier to find developers interested in contributing.  CORBA also allows
us to utilize a plethora of languages which should prevent simular issues
to thoses of the PHP performance issue.

Hope this helps.  Feel free to ask more questions.

--Aaron

--
Aaron Turner, Core Developer       http://vodka.linuxkb.org/~aturner/
Linux Knowledge Base Organization  http://www.linuxkb.org/
Because world domination requires quality open documentation.
aka: aturner@vicinity.com, aturner@pobox.com, ion_beam_head@ashtech.net
The difference between `Unstable' and `Usable' is only two characters: NT