Christian Walther wrote:That's an interesting perspective, but it doesn't quite match my impression. Have you followed the development activity in SVN? Or even just the recent clashes between boblishman and GPNMilano? SVN activity is certainly not overwhelming, and obviously declining, but I do still see steady activity, well above the level of some of my own projects that I don't consider abandoned at all. And, more importantly, I see accumulation of work.
I came across the Bob/Chloe flood after it had taken place and it was quite a shock to me, I must say -- glad misunderstandings got more or less straightened out in the end. (I'll make another note around this at the end of this post)
Now, any coding (and I use the word in its lightest possible sense) that I myself has ever done, has been the equivalent of a huge mess of 'let's-see-what-this-does' post-it notes, tacked on top of and around eachother. From the wording I see used (on the forum, I have read no SVN comments), some developers seem to regard experimental parts of their contribs as pretty much that sort of thing and that they'd like to get any conclusions they may have derived from it properly reimplemented, within an overarching coordinated framework, before seeing it fit for public release. One might argue that 'then why do they bother with uploading them at all?' or that 'in that case someone should take the reins and clearly define that framework if it that is not already done', but this is the point at which I prefer to make the assumption that people do stuff for good reason, rather than any other guess. The guess I made is that while devs knows where they want to go, details of the framework is up in the air, until we get a glimpse of Cyan's material.
Christian Walther wrote:My third question that you're referring to was not meant as "Does anyone have any plans for PyPRP, or is it completely abandoned?", but rather as "Does anyone have any plans for coordinated public releases, or is everyone just working away on it according to their own agenda?"
Ok, I took it as "what is the planned direction for pyprp development?", but upon rereading, I notice the word "releases" at the end. As I said, my guess has been that the work we see done, has been for research purposes, more than implementation.
Christian Walther wrote:The (subjective and so far unfounded) impression I get is that a lot of cool things are being done, or have been done, but nobody uses them, because they're only being driven to the point of being useful to an intrepid few. While I can completely relate to that with my programmer hat on, it does seem a bit of a shame from the point of view of the users. I suspect that there could be a lot of people who think that if anything was wasted effort, it was developing all that in the first place, when a comparatively small bit of additional effort could bring it to a much greater audience. But I can't really judge that, since as a programmer myself (and probably even one with a rather extreme tendence in that direction) I know full well that programming, like any creative activity, is an end in itself and does not require any intention of making anything useful to outsiders.
The way I see it, throwing stuff away is what we're doing if we never shape the current PyPRP trunk into a release. Is the prospect of a new, libPlasma-based PyPRP really reason enough to leave everything we currently have behind in an almost-finished state? I admit I haven't bothered to check, but what I've passively heard so far has seemed a bit vaporware to me. Is there any actual development on it going on?
Don't get me wrong -- as a user, I would love to get a new reliable release and a fireworks display where there is nobody to see it, is indeed a bit of a waste -- I'm just trying to draw conclusions from limited information here, preferrably without conjuring conspiracy theories. :7
Christian Walther wrote:I wonder if more people think like you, Jojon. That would certainly explain the somewhat unimpressive response to this initiative.
It would certainly be good to see some more responses from those actually concerned. C'mon guys, let's have it all out here in one big group therapy session. ;)
I wrote that I'd say something about recent clashes on the forum. This is not about the case mentioned specifically, but just a little comment on such things in general. I have hung around this place since its early days and have from time to time noticed how admireably active people have suddenly stopped posting. A few times this has been preceeded by a tense exchange of words or two. I have at these times never discerned any apparent reason for such tension and can only guess that it has grown either out of general uncertainty (which has had even stalvarts like boblishman and Andy throwing their hands up in despair at different points), or something said in private. What I'm saying is that we have thoughout the existance of this place seemed to steadily lose good people. Does anybody have a decent perception of why this is, because I seem to be missing it. Other than becoming more transparent, what can we possibly do to stop this drift, if it's not just something I'm imagining?
IMO, in most cases, even this is a lot easier than hex editing Plasma-objects (however complex the interface may prove 
).
), or we're deviating from the topic. The project I'm trying to gauge support for is about taking the features and bugfixes that we have in a sufficiently finished state and bringing them out to the people, 
