What is thew future of Smart?

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

> So after spending some considerable time with the Smart project over the
> past few weeks I find that Smart has some limitations with its future
(...)
> It appears that obvious simple fixes cannot be applied because it might
> break backwards compatibility. (...) A very simple example is
> the smart channel --show-penalities command,

Rehan, I thought we had discussed this enough in the IRC channel.  If you
want to be taken seriously, do not mix "the future of Smart" and your
preferred spelling of a command line option.

> we should run the --dump option in parallel with a new --show option

Preferred spelling of --dump...

> However we should focus on the much bigger issue of whether smart's
> feature set is fixed and if not to what extent it is changeable.

... the future feature set ...

> With Smart this is not the case. The version is at 0.52 which suggests that
(...)

... and now the topic is which version number to use...

> An associated issue is user requests.

... and user requests, and so forth.

> I suspect that some of these issues are related to the fact that Smart is
> used in Landscape and changes need to be carefully made so as not to break
> Landscape.

Changes need to be carefully made to not break *Smart*.  Is Smart your first
real contact with software development?

> In that case then Landscape needs to be the upstream of Smart. If
> Landscape is not the upstream of Smart and Smart is indeed an independent
> project that has the freedom to respond to its user base, then Landscape bzr
> branches should be in their own sub-project ideally and Landscape's Smart
> version should track changes in Smart as it's upstream. Smarts relationship
> to Landscape should be made much clearer if Smart is tied to Landscape's
> requirements.

Really, what the heck are you talking about?  Landscape is an entirely different
project, which happens to use Smart.  The only thing that Landscape is doing to
Smart is getting it *more users*.

> Without due consideration of these issues I don't believe Smart has a way
> forward. It just cannot grow with users needs in a sensible way.

I appreciate your interest in moving Smart forward, but you're addressing
the problem from the wrong perspective.

Have you stopped and asked yourself what do you want out of Smart?  What
does it mean "to move forward"?  Is it to spell "--show-penalities" as
"--show-penalties"?  Is it just changing the version number from 0.52 to 1.0?

Very long emails which mix random nitpicking, pointless bitching  (no facts,
no data, nothing) about how other projects affect Smart, and a *lot* more,
really make me feel bad about taking the time to answer them.

Write down your long term goal for Smart, and then think for yourself what
steps would guide you to that long term goal, and *focus* on them, so that
the people reading your ideas can share your vision.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net