[Geany-Devel] Proposal from the Mint distro

[Lex Trotman]

Hi All,

Along with the previous response on the icon, the following was proposal
was also received from Clement of the Mint distro:

"Another thing I wanted to ask you about, and I'm glad you contacted us, is
about the configuration of Geany as a text editor for users (as opposed to
developers). Geany is brilliant and I personally use it as a developer to
do most of my work in Python, C, PHP and other languages. But it could also
be a great contender for a default text editor in Linux Mint in replacement
of gedit. We're not happy at all with gedit 3, in particular when it comes
to searching and replacing occurrences in a text file. We considered
replacing it with Geany, with an older GTK2 version of gedit or even
forking it to provide a new tool dedicated to text editing.

What is your opinion on this? If we used Geany for this, we would hide all
developer features (symbols, buttons, statusbars..etc) from it. Would you
rather like us shipping a version of geany which by default looks like a
simple text editor (and so devs would have to go in the preferences and
re-enable all the normal features) or fork geany into a new project
dedicated to text editing (i.e. basically a dumbed down version of geany
with features removed). With a fork of course we'd give credit to geany in
our communication and within the tool itself, we'd work with you on making
sure you're happy with the end-result and the editor would have a distinct
generic name ("text editor" for instance) so it would be possible for users
to have both this editor and geany installed side-by-side and to open
documents with either of them. Let me know your thoughts on this. We're not
sure what the best approach is, but whether it happens now or later, we're
pretty sure gedit 3 isn't what we want to use going forward."

To kick the ball off, here is my thoughts on the topic.

First thought is that there is plenty of upside to such cooperation in
terms of attracting more contributors to the developer version of Geany.

The flip side of that is of course that more bugs would be reported and
expected to be fixed.  (Bug reports are good, its the *expectation* that
they will be quickly fixed that is the problem.)  I would hope that Mint
would be able to contribute to that effort.

I am not sure how much effort it would take to make the Geany UI able to
hide the "developer" features, it will be some complication for sure, but
probably not a big one.

If Mint use a "friendly fork" approach it does reduce the impact this has
on the Geany project, but it will also reduce the possible bugfixes that
come back to Geany (since the fork is different patches may not apply).

If we provide the "plain editor" version as an option on Geany it adds to
the workload, though I would hope that Mint would contribute to that extra
effort.

I am personally undecided at the moment, noting that Mint will do what is
appropriate for their distro, and it is up to us to try to engage with them
ina way that provides the maximum benefit for both groups.

Cheers
Lex
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