On Wed, Apr 01, 2020 at 11:49:41AM +0200, Clement Verna wrote:
> There is also an historical taste to write in house applications for
> things that don't really seems critical to the Fedora Project, for example
> do we really need a custom calendar application ? or election application
> ? It seems that every time we have a problem the solution is let's write
> something to solve that problem, instead of trying to find a compromise
> and reuse existing solutions.
Could please stop this?
This is me also asking this.
The continuous theme of "we're building things because we like it" is unfair to
all the people who have been involved in the infrastructure at some point in the
past.
It is assuming that there was no reasons, that they did not do their research,
that they didn't think it through.
The requirements for applications 3 years ago were vastly different from what
they are today.
If you don't know the historical reasons for an app, there are a number of
people around who can answer them, but please let's stop assuming things which
are at the end of the day insulting and demotivating for the people who were
involved then and are still now.
This goes for fedocal, for pagure, for anitya. I've seen this question come up
often enough (here and elsewhere): "Why aren't we using libraries.io instead of
anytia?"
Well, the simple reason is: because libraries.io *did* *not* *exist* when anitya
was created. So maybe we are not the bad ones that didn't do their research.
I am also sick and tired of this. For many years, a central drive for Fedora Infra was about building the Free and Open Source tools to allow a community to work together without using closed source tools. This was a constant requirement of the community to us at the time with wanting something to 'compete' against Canonical's forge and Canonicals' other tools. Things have changed but instead of saying "Good job, thanks for all that work but we have decided to change.", our efforts are brought up constantly as a bunch of NIH who wasted time and effort. And it doesn't matter how many times people are reminded that we had reasons and research for doing this from 2005 to 2015.. it gets thrown in our faces that we reinvented the wheel when there were clearly better things to spend our time on.