Getting more developers (was Re: LYNX-DEV Lynx v2.7.2 release)

[Andrew Kuchling]

Foteos Macrides <address@hidden> wrote:
>       I've been thinking about the situation, in particular that we don't
>know, as Henry put it "when, if ever" Klaus will return to finish debugging
>the devel code "merges" with lynx271f, and that the last time he disappeared
>he did not return for several months.  This is a serious problem for Lynx
>users ...

        Lynx is suffering badly from a lack of developers; there
aren't very many people working on it--Foteos, Thomas Dickey, the
intermittently-available Klaus Weide are the primary ones (apologies
to anyone I've forgotten), along with people who make occasional
contributions--and most of the critical things on the TODO list, such
as table support, CSS, scripting, would be very labour-intensive,
requiring significant amounts of new code and restructuring of
existing code.  FM, TD, and KW don't have the time to do these large
projects.  I have no idea how to encourage people to hack on Lynx,
unfortunately.

        Web browsers don't seem to do very well as free development
projects; there are several stagnant X11 browser projects, too
(Mnemonic, Grail, various continuations of Mosaic and Arena
development).  Perhaps most people are content with Netscape or Lynx
as they are, and don't care.


        Andrew Kuchling
        address@hidden
        http://starship.skyport.net/crew/amk/