Why is $patch not merged and made optional?

answered 2012-11-20 11:01:19 +0000

Michael
3081 ●13 ●28 ●50 http://i3wm.org/

There are many downsides to letting software grow without any bounds (that is, merging all patches that come up):

• More options means longer documentation and more choice for users. While choice is not always bad, the amount of options we have can already be overwhelming. I’d rather have users read all the documentation because it’s short than providing so many options that people cannot manage to read the docs anymore, but two people are happy with their edge cases.
• More code paths means more things to test, both automated (where appropriate) and manually. This means more effort for all our developers, which is a bad thing. As an example, I am running i3 with xft fonts on my notebook and with x core fonts on my workstation, just to make sure that both code paths are working fine.
• The more different use cases we support, the less clear it becomes what i3 actually is and how it is intended to use. Eventually, it will be able to receive email ;-).

I hope that makes my intentions clear when declining to merge patches. I do see that people obviously put effort into their work and obviously have a use-case for it, but because of the above reasons I think it’s better to not merge some patches.