[Geany-Devel] A direction for Geany

[Matthew Brush]

On 13-11-13 02:30 AM, Lex Trotman wrote:
> [...]
>
>> How many "Geany on Windows" users are there? is it 90% POSIX/10%
>> Windows? Or more? Less?
>>
>> I'm a big fan of the "90% rule". If 90% of the users don't need/want
>> it, don't implement or support it. Same goes for library versions: if
>> 90%+ has GTK3, it's safe to require that.
>>
>
> Because Geany does not install spyware to see where it is used, we really
> don't know.  :)
>
> Various people make various guesses based on their personal experience, but
> really the people who know are only the users themselves.
>
> I was thinking of asking on the users ML, after we agreed the questions
> here first.  But do we want to?
>

It's a great idea but as you mentioned on IRC, we really have no way to 
know how representative subscribers to the users list are. For example 
maybe only X out of every X^Y Geany users subscribes to the mailing 
list, so even if we ask and N people say one thing, still the vast 
majority of users might be indifferent or completely disagree if they 
were asked/subscribed.

> Are we looking for "market share"?  Or are we interested in making the best
> software that suits the contributors, and if its useful to others fine?
>

Suiting the contributors/developers goes a long way in a project like 
Geany that is meant for users who themselves are also developers. What's 
more we have a mix of contributors on most popular *nix distros, 
Windows, even some using MacOS, and we all eat our own dogfood.

> Thats a pretty deep and fundamental question about the project, what do
> those who are interested enough to monitor the dev list think?
>

My personal opinion is that in each new release we should try to support 
the then current versions of all platforms that our cross-platform 
toolkit allows us to support. I don't think we should do any more or 
less than that.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush