[Github-comments] [geany/geany] Geany needs spyware (Discussion #2918)

[elextr]

Please note the number of emoji in discussions that mention adding spyware.  

To be clear, I do not support software having spyware, despite the potential benefits for developers.  And as IANAL I don't know what legal issues spyware may have, even if its possible to turn it off.  And anyway statistics tell you what people use now, not what they might use if it was added or an existing unused feature improved.

And really, Geany isn't guided by statistics, but by what people contribute.  No matter how many statistics there are, if nobody contributes a change it won't happen.  

There are no paid directed developers following a master plan shaped by gathered statistics.  Its all whatever people contribute, either their own ideas, or ones they get from feature request issues, or from issue discussions/arguments, or stolen from other projects, or whatever.  Then the only filter on the contributions is if the (volunteer) committers have the time and interest to review test and merge changes.  

If somebody thinks a pull request is not suitable they may simply say so, or suggest changes, or totally ignore it, although getting _no_ response is rare for pull requests, but more so for feature requests.  As people might have noticed one of my bugbears is people who want to effectively remove existing features by replacing them or simply deleting them.  IMO thats like saying "I don't want it that way so nobody can have it" and a better approach is to try to add the new feature as additional functionality, or provide an option to select it (if it can't coexist with an existing feature) or put it in a plugin so the user can decide to include it or not.

In general one or more contributors will comment if an idea is outside their image of what Geany should do, its in an interesting space, a lightweight IDE between plain editors like Vim and full fat IDEs like Visual studio or Eclipse and generally should stay there (IMHO) since there are not many other similar options.  That means there are things it probably will never do (like type inference), and why I use Eclipse for C++ development rather than try to fatten Geany to provide similar features.

Of course as all volunteer time is limited, large changes can sit for a long time before anyone has the time to review, test, and merge them.  Especially in these "interesting" times.  So Geany tends to move in small steps punctuated by occasional lurches, which makes it fun but occasionally frustrating :grin:.

[end thesis, all opinions are my own and other contributors may disagree (and probably will)]

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