[Geany-Devel] Proposal from the Mint distro

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 18.10.2012 02:55, schrieb Lex Trotman:
>
> 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.



First of all, I find the idea of Geany becoming the default text editor 
in some distro. The idea that a distro uses an IDE as a text editor by 
default is an acknowledgement for our goal to keep Geany lightweight.

I understand they want a simplified user interface. However, as Geany 
would be exposed to many newcomers, it should be clearly visible that 
this is not the real Geany (which is vastly more powerful). So IMO the 
name should express the difference (perhaps "Geany Lite"?). Otherwise 
the newcomers will think of Geany as a simple text editor, and not a 
powerful IDE and ultimately use another program for IDE tasks.

However, in the end it would be best and most important to avoid a fork, 
since that doesn't help us a bit.

PS: I'm also not sure that a new wave of contribution will come from the 
Linux Mint side, seeing that they consider to fork gedit rather than to 
improve it collectively with upstream (but perhaps they just became 
hesitant to work with Gnome people?). He even suggested forking Geany in 
his very first approach to us.

Best regards.
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