[Geany] Per-workspace instance of Geany

[Lex Trotman]

Eric & Thomas,

Don't get me wrong, I agree that Geany needs more people who can test
format and commit patches and bugfixes and more people who can develop
the more major changes we have talked about in branches.  I think that
Geany makes very little use of branches, even for a SVN project.

And yes the slow pace of change is frustrating (although I don't say
this too often since my own lack of time to do much more than emails
could prompt the obvious comeback :-D but I hope the emails are
helpful in the meantime)

What it needs to get this going is some offers to be maintainers and
maybe a maintenance/unstable branch so only critical fixes go directly
in trunk and unstable gets promoted after suitable testing.  This can
allow commits to be checked by multiple people until the new commiters
get practice (I know how easy it is to forget the commit log, or
format wrong).

Also I believe that the project needs some planning and management for
the bigger changes. Unless the change is purely experimental its not
good to make major changes without planning and discussion, I refer to
the session management changes as an example (without in any way
criticising those who worked on them, they responded to concerns as
they were raised, but would have had a better time if some of the
problems had been addressed prior to implementation).

Whilst I am not suggesting anything near as formal as the PEP system
used by Python, the general idea of having a written description of
what the change is intended to do and how it is to be implemented
helps the implementors get their ideas straight and might point out
some of the potential pitfalls prior to starting.  It also ensures
that everyone has an idea of the extent of the changes so there will
be less surprises of the "but I didn't expect it to do that" type.

Anyways I'll climb down off my soapbox now :-)

Cheers
Lex

On 24 January 2011 14:06, Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+tools at mega-nerd.com> wrote:
> Lex Trotman wrote:
>
>> Everyone in the Geany "inner circle" as you call it, only works on
>> Geany in their own time, and they all have other things to do,
>
> I'm well aware of how much time and energy an open source project can
> suck up. I'm the main maintainer of two widely used FOSS libraries,
> which i only work on in my own time.
>
>> they
>> move house, they take holidays, their internet goes down (all happened
>> in 2010)...  So yes, response time can be variable, and busy people
>> don't always read all the messages in a conversation etc, its the
>> nature of a small project.
>>
>> If you have constructive suggestions they will be welcome I'm sure,
>> but remember that big changes of process or code will be difficult to
>> have accepted due to the limited time people have to consider and
>> understand the proposals, and to implement and test the changes,
>> incremental change is the way to approach things when resources are
>> thin.
>
> I was not actually asking for more reponsiveness for the existing
> small set of developers, but rather an increase in the number of
> people with commit access.
>
>> As to Gedit, it has only one instance with multiple windows (my option
>> 3) so many of the problems don't apply, but refactoring Geany to
>> support multiple top levels is a big change.
>
> Unfortunately, that statement, in conjunction with the above, is in
> effect saying "the project's inertia and lack of current progress
> means nothing much will change".
>
> Erik
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Erik de Castro Lopo
> http://www.mega-nerd.com/
>