On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Douglas C. MacKenzie wrote:

> As a thank you to this mailing list and the Coda developers
> I would like to pass on my thoughts and experiences with Coda.

[... lots of lines deleted ...]

> to look at is an assert statement that you have to wait for
> Jan Harkes (who was always very helpful) to interpret.

Oh yes, Jan seems really quick to answer on the mailing list...

****

The following spent some time in my postponed e-mail folder, but the post
I am replying to triggered me to go back and send it.

Regarding Coda in a production environment I would like to add some
thoughts:

Many people seem to test Coda (or think about testing it), but they turn
away. I think this has several reasons:

1) Documentation often seems to be outdated and the FAQ hold no FAQs. A
   lot of concepts remains unexplained and finding out what went wrong
   when anything went wrong often is a real pain, due to lack of
   documentation (or lack of the ability to find it).

2) Prospective users are unsure about the size of the development team and
   about the committment of CMU towards Coda. This does not add to user
   confidence.

3) Project management is not visible: coda-announce has announcements for
   only a couple of releases. What about the others? [ OK the NEWS section
   on the web site has some more information ]

4) The future of Coda seems unclear.

5) Coda development lasts for more than 10 years, but it still seems not
   to be ready for production. I think this is the single most problematic
   reason. It just does not feel good to know of such a long development
   phase without a really stable product coming out.

Many of these issues may seem unfair, but this is what may keep users from
using Coda.

My own story runs along these lines as well. I first thought about
using Coda some two years ago, and I was unsure about its state because
of what I mentinoed above.

Now that I use it ("for production", with me being the only user, but
using it heavily for disconnected operation to do "real work") I still
feel not comfortable enough to recommend it for heavier use. After some
volume related problems, I fear that I will experience problems like Doug
did. This is not a comfortable situation. 

Most of this is a psychological problem, keeping people away from Coda,
thus keeping the userbase rather small, thus having less testers and
developers....

peter