We’ve been working on rolling out Habari 0.4 for months, since 0.3 came out really. There are a lot of great changes in 0.4. The bad part is that nobody can get motivated enough to release 0.4, or they have a personal agenda to include certain features to be in 0.4 before its release in spite of long discussions about “release early, release often”. It’s so many things that separately are insignificant but together leave 0.4 floundering and gasping on the shore instead of spawning like it should.
For example, let’s talk about the logo just briefly as an example of where we’re spending pointless effort. The logo was the very first thing that the community attacked, and the best that anyone came up with in rebuttal was a capital letter “H”, some remixed clipart, and RKO-style radio transmission rings. Whereas what we have now has history, mystique, prints well in black and white, and functions fairly well as a Habari brand icon. So why are we even talking about this?
One very disconcerting issue from a coding point of view is everyone’s sudden inspiration to crap on the source and let other people clean it up. For example, there’s a link on the publish page that says “View post”. All it does is view the published post’s permalink. But it doesn’t look like anything else on the publish page. As a matter of fact, it was kind of dumped on the publish page after much concerted deliberation and discussion over what the page should look like. The implication is, “I want this here, you all figure it out.” Crap on the code, let someone else fix it. This particular instance is not too significant, but it isn’t the only place that this has happened.
