Re: What is wrong with this project?

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Fred,

I knew some kind of nostalgic and bitter email from you would come, but 
I hadn't expected it now.

On 03/27/15 17:02, Fred Kiefer wrote:
> As most of you GNUsteppers know, I have been active in this project for
> quite some time now. Well, exactly 15 years now. Not much was functional
> at that time. What ever part of GNUstep you tried to us broke down on
> touching and needed fixing. But it was also a time of great progress. In
> a few months we got support for different fonts, better RTF and a lot
> more improvements into the primitive text handling GNUstep had at that
> time. I moved on to NSColor and NSBezierPath, which I both rewrote
> completely. Next I added a whole backend for MS Windows, just for fun.
> Later Alexander Malmberg vanished from the project, Greg became project
> leader and I ended up as maintainer of back and gui. And the years went
> by...

I remember too those pionieristic times. With a lot to do, it was easy 
to find something fun to fix and to implement, or to debug and test.
In those times I had David Ayers connected on my HP-PA machine fixing 
function calls while I was biting my teeth on 68k... and there were, 
except a few, almost no applications. Of course Ink was already there, 
since I came in 2/3 years later than you.

> Why am I writing about all this? I think it is time now for me to step
> down as the maintainer of the GNUstep back and gui packages. There are
> many reason for this move and I have been thinking about it for some
> time already. What finally triggered that decision was the experience of
> the last few days. I have been ill a bit, which stopped me from going
> out and left more time for GNUstep. I worked on a few issues and
> resolved some tiny problems. But what was the reaction on the mailing
> lists? Nothing or negative. On the days before we had for example about
> a mail per day on the window resize flickering issue. When I (partly)
> resolved it and ask for testers on the mailing list, communication on
> that topic stopped. And when it resumed again it was full of complaints
> about remaining issues that are on special hardware, deprecated backends
> or even completely unrelated.

I noticed that too. I know you refer to my complaints, but I just wrote 
out some results on the hardware I had around, may you like it or not. 
At least I reported something and don't think it was unrelated.

I understand how you feel: I am injured for 7 weeks now and I devoted a 
lot of time to GNUstep. However, unable to collaborate with anybody, I 
just hacked on some stuff off my own where I can make progress alone. I 
resuscitated some more old code, fixed some app bugs. I hope somebody 
will enjoy, but it doesn't satisfy me fully.
The feeling that nobody really cares remains.

> For me the feeling of progress in GNUstep is gone. And with it the fun
> of working late nights on GNUstep. And without fun GNUstep is just
> unpayed and unhonored work.

I understand you fully. I feel some kind of heavy burden: there are 
problems that are unresolved since years, some even since the beginning 
of me joining GNUstep!
The last experience about the line spacing, a single thing that blocks 
making all the fine progress done in SWK really frustrates me a lot.
What is wrong in this project? Perhaps there is no answer, but compared 
to the "pioneer" years, it is difficult now to fix things.
Besides the "new shiny stuff" it would be cool to have, when a project 
matures and wants to be usable it needs to stabilize, mature and that is 
a burden.
Everybody likes the fun to write a new library, a new app, a new 
backend... But a usable backend needs to work fine. An application needs 
to stop crashing, etc etc.

I have been taking care of soo many applications that are inside so 
brittle, it is taking me years to fix crashers, build problems, etc etc. 
Then I have no idea if I am the only one running GWorkspace, 
ProjectCenter or TalkSoup.



> I am sure Greg will come up with a perfect replacement. Somebody who is
> going to review your patches and fix your bugs a lot better than I have
> been doing lately and somebody that has fun doing so. And me? I will
> stick around quietly, maybe work on bits I wanted to fix for a long time
> now and perhaps the fun will come back.

Don't say that. You have done an excellent job, you fixed and improved 
so many things an did that with a high quality standard. In the current 
GS community I know nobody that could replace you.
Your gui competence is one of the best we have.
Ask Greg and I hope he will confirm how much I praised your work.

Think about our meetings with Nikolaus: perhaps SWK still doesn't do 
something useful, but think about how many bugs and shortcomings were 
fixed thanks of it and your work in GUI!

So I hope you won't go away and stay with us. I hope you will continue 
with your valuable contributions.

I hope we an all get our fun back. Perhaps it is tied to expectactions.
GNUstep is better than 15 years ago!

Stay with us,
Riccardo