On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 03:04:55PM +0200, Fabian Groffen wrote:
Just to throw it in once more...
... or make it easier for users and yourself and make it all one package, where you just do --{enable,disable}-{sql,xquery,...} at the configure call. Greatly eases packaging too.
No.
Why?
-- I want to spend my development time with programming and *not* with compiling MonetDB over and over, just because there have been other people's commits that force me to recompile once more. The ideal situation would be to have a stable (with respect to its functionality and its interfaces) MonetDB core package against which the different front-ends are coded. Way too often we are suffering from quite the opposite situation already: careless commits break core functionality, which hinders too many people in their development efforts.
-- Pathfinder is a standalone and retargetable compiler. Most of my coding is not related to back-end changes at all. And when I do changes that do not directly involve the MonetDB back-end, there is no need to have my development efforts slowed down by a package as huge as MonetDB including all its front-ends.
Throwing all our code into a single big pot would only heal the single symptom that we are currently observing. Even worse, it would lead to a bigger mess in our code, instead of enforcing discipline and stable, well-designed interfaces.
Other open source projects, by the way, have had to spend a lot of effort to go just the opposite way, from a bloated monolithic project to a nice, modularized software (I'm thinking of the XFree project here).
Regards,
Jens