Are the Open Source desktops too complicated?

[Drews, Jonathan*]

Hi:

 I read portions of the "Desktop FreeBSD" thread and have to agree somewhat
with Joao Schim's remarks. I did docs on Kde (Kformula, Kchart, and Kget)
and my experience was that the developers were more interested in adding
features rather than getting the bugs squashed. I finally gave up on
contributing to Kde because locating bugs was becoming extremely difficult.
In some cases my bug reports were just closed out.
 I tend to agree with Victoria Livschitz, a senior IT architect with Sun
Microsystems. Perhaps the Kde (and Gnome) desktops are becoming to
complicated for volunteers to adequately maintain? 

Excerpt:
  
Question]  Jaron Lanier has argued that we cannot write big programs
with a lot of code without creating many bugs, which he concludes is a
sign that something is fundamentally wrong

Victoria] I agree with Jaron's thesis completely. The correlation of the
size of the software with its quality is overwhelming and very
suggestive. I think his observations raise numerous questions: Why are
big programs so buggy? And not just buggy, but buggy to a point beyond
salvation. Is there an inherent complexity factor that makes bugs grow
exponentially, in number, severity, and in how difficult they are to
diagnose? If so, how do we define complexity and deal with it?

From: The Next Move in Programming: A Conversation with Sun's Victoria
Livschitz
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/livschitz_qa.html


							Kind regards,
							Jonathan
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