From: Aredridel <aredridel@...>
Date: 2005-04-09T09:03:44+09:00
Subject: Re: New fcgi gem sorely needed

On Sat, Apr 09, 2005 at 08:29:48AM +0900, Thursday wrote:
> In principal, I agree with you 100%.  But this world is full of people 
> that make technology decisions based on PERCEPTION or outdated policies 
> rather than technical merit or common sense.

That's sad. I'm tempted to say "let them go the way of the dinosaur" if
their policies are so inane.  This is why large companies get
outmaneuvered by small ones.

> I know of one company that wouldn't allow Apache 1.3 to replace IIS 4.0 
> solely on the basis of IT policy not allowing software with version 1.x 
> to be installed.

Aye. And with that policy, they'd probably install Apache 2.0 when it's
in a state less stable than Apache 1.

> So while I agree with you in principal, I think fcgi going 1.0, 1.1 or 
> 2.1 (better still) would make it SUBSTANTIALLY easier to convince many 
> companies to use Ruby+Rails in the enterprise.  Keeping it at 0.x means 
> that it has zero chance of getting installed in many places.

I'd say that it's not there yet, then. If that's the company policy,
then they'd be wise to re-state it: We don't use technologies with out
least being proven for four years... or whatever number makes sense.

Simply changing the version to 1.0 isn't going to help. Getting tons of
production-use feedback collected would be good as a marker for 1.0...
I'd only feel comfortable calling something 1.0 if it's either so
trivial as to be fairly obviously correct (my ruby-xattr library comes
to mind), or having been extensively tested by at least a few people,
and getting some good feedback. I think ruby-fcgi is more or less at a
0.8.6 out of 1.0 as far as testing, if you assume 1.0 is "it works, all
features stated work and it doesn't crash under any reasonable
circumstance (even failure states)"

I'd much rather have it be considered pre-1.0 and get it tested well
before someone with a truly mission-critical need puts the code in some
place where it will fail. I'd rather it not be used yet, than have it
break and put egg on someone's face.

Ari