Re: What is wrong with this project?

[Sergii Stoian]

Fred, I'm completly understand your feelings.

Your post touched me so deeply, so I decide to write you several words (despite the fact that I didn't write to mailing list several years). Maybe it helps you... Maybe it helps others...

I stepped back as ProjectCenter maintainer. Stopped fixing bugs and making because... it feels like endless and pointless work to me at some point. My dream that drive me all these years was to have an OPENSTEP desktop enviroment pixel to pixel and feeling to feeling.

Several last years project aims drifting to current trends in modern desktop concepts. And It's OK until my dream may come true some day.

And I asked myself some questions:
1. Do I want to go out of project? - No, I don't.
2. What can I do to motivate myself? - I have to work on bringing my dream to life.

3. Does my goals contarry to GNUstep project goals? - Maybe at some point.

4. What can I do to sort out these contraditions? Discuss it with community? - Discussing is pointless. I need to write code (create OPENSTEP desktop environment) and show it to GNUstep community when it will be usable enough. Maybe it will become new driver/motivator for some persons/community/project itself. Who knows...

5. How much time it will take? 5 years? 10 years? - I don't care. ;-)

So I decided to go offline and start working on point 4. And I do it for last 2 years.

Let's analyze how Qt and GTK+ evolves during the same period of time as GNUstep exists: Qt and GTK+ community have applications! That what toolkits and developer tools are existing for! That is what motivate developers to improve and fix applications which make their life easier and funnier.

Maybe it's time to sort out with your motivation(s)?

Get well. Fred (in all senses)!

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Fred Kiefer <address@hidden> 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...


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.
Or lets take another recent example. German Arias is working on
resolving some cursor issues on MS Windows and it is great that he is
doing so, as that platform gets little love nowadays. He send a patch to
the mailing list and I commented on it, but didn't get a reply on that.
Later I saw his commit, with part of my comments addressed, but others
ignored. Why is that? I don't know and I am tiered of asking. Next he
send a video displaying tool tips issues that a clearly caused by not
sending mouse leave events to the window. Should I now write the same
mail a second time?

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 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.

Good luck to all of you,
Fred

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Sergii Stoian, ProjectCenter maintainer