Re: ImageJ development involvement/contributions

Posted by Adrian Daerr-2 on Dec 15, 2009; 6:09pm
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/ImageJ-development-involvement-contributions-tp3690030p3690040.html

On 15/12/09 5:56, Paul Johnston wrote:
> I agree with Raymond, people should not resist or fear change.  To
> demand 100% backwards compatibility forever ultimately would doom any
> software project

I agree as well. This list is one of the strongest arguments that
experiments need not be feared, even if a couple of plug-ins break: I
have always been impressed with the extremely fast reaction to bug
reports (including from Wayne of course, but not only!). So I believe
that if a few percent of currently used plug-ins stop working due to a
deep design change and despite a backward compatibility layer, and those
plug-ins are not updated by their original authors spontaneously,
chances are high that a post on this mailing list will solve the problem
within hours. So in my opinion, instead of "100% backwards
compatibility", a new design should "simply" (quotes because it'll be
hard enough to do even then) strive at providing a compatibility for
most plug-ins and such that the broken ones can be fixed by as little
changes as possible. I am optimistic that this list will take care of
users with no programming knowledge as it has in the past.

Good luck to those (on both sides of the current dispute ;-)) who are
working on making ImageJ evolve, I look forward to seeing what you come
up with.

Adrian