[Freeipa-devel] Command instantiation

[Petr Viktorin]

On 01/14/2013 08:45 PM, John Dennis wrote:
> On 01/14/2013 12:56 PM, Jan Cholasta wrote:
>> On 14.1.2013 18:50, Petr Viktorin wrote:
>>> Ah, yes, you've discovered my ultimate goal: rewriting the whole
>>> framefork :)
>>
>> It would seem we share the same ultimate goal, sir! :-)
>
> Well it's reassuring I'm not alone in my frustration with elements of
> the framework. I thought it was just me :-)
>
> I have one other general complaint about the framework:
>
> Too much magic!
>
> What do I mean by magic? Things which spring into existence at run time
> for which there is no static definition. I've spent (wasted) significant
> amounts of time trying to figure out how something gets instantiated and
> initialized. These things don't exist in the static code, you can't
> search for them because they are synthetic. You can see these things
> being referenced but you'll never find a class definition or __init__()
> method or assignment to a specific object attribute. It's all very very
> clever but at the same time very obscure. If you just use the framework
> in a cookie-cutter fashion this has probably never bothered you, but if
> you have modify what the framework provides it can be difficult.
>
> But I don't want to carp on the framework too much without giving credit
> to Jason first. His mandate was to produce a pluggable framework that
> was robust, extensible, and supported easy plugin authorship. Jason was
> dedicated, almost maniacal in his attention to detail and best
> practices. He also had to design most of this himself (the rest of the
> team was heads down on other things at the time). It has mostly stood
> the test of time. It's pretty hard to anticipate the pain points, that's
> something only experience with system can give you down the road, which
> is where we find ourselves now.
>

+1.
It's easy to criticize in hindsight, and I have great respect for the 
framework and its author.
Nevertheless, software grows over time and we need to balance bolting 
things on with improving the foundations, so that we don't get stuck in 
a maze of workarounds in a few years.


-- 
Petr³