Re: What is wrong with this project?

[Gregory Casamento]

Fred, the 

On Friday, March 27, 2015, 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.

No one I will find could possibly replace you, but only succeed you.  You are an instrumental person in this community and I can only hope that you will continue to be so.  Your striving for perfection and your relentless push to do things in the best possible manner have made this project better in so many ways.   

I know that you will continue to be around and, for that, I'm grateful.  I would sincerely hate to lose you completely.  I only hope that your eventual successor and the rest of the team in the interim until said successor is found can continue to uphold the strict standards you have always maintained for yourself and for the rest of us. 

Rest assured that as gui/back maintainer you will be sorely missed.  

 

> Good luck to all of you,
> Fred

Your friend,

Gregory Casamento  

-- 
Gregory Casamento
GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
http://ind.ie/phoenix/