I am quite busy recently and have not been actively testing a few patches that I should have looked at (middle button paste, latex_lang, no spell checking etc). But I felt that I have to take a side in this debate this time. Maybe surprisingly, I am at Lar's side.
I am not sure how many active developers were there in the pre-1.5 cycles but there has been many new comers (like me) in the 1.5 cycle. While I agree that 1.5.0 is far better than 1.4.x, it was mostly unusable during development, and there are major bugs in 1.5.1. I am using lyx on a daily basis and it crashes two or more times each day. This is in my view unacceptable, and part of the reason I advocated that we should freeze the trunk and sync it with 1.5.3, which has hopefully been stabilized. Every patch has the potential to introduce new bugs, no matter how simple it looks, and others' opinion can obviously help. Taking the recent File->Revert example. My simple patch was revised eight times. Two crashes was found by Enrico and Georg suggested a new feature and helped the readability a lot. I think this should be the way *any* patch is introduced to the trunk. It may be true that Abdel is only one who knows that particular piece of code, but it should not be too difficult for others to understand it. Using a branch enhances the publicity of a progressing patch, but it can not replace the final review of the patch. I have expressed similar views, including the two-backing-a-new-feature policy. I hope Jose has read and thought about them. This also explains why I was mad at the XML patch. Yes, it was discussed before I came but things may have changed a lot during the year, and there has been many new comers who deserve to know what is going on, and may have some opinions. I have high expectations of this XML thing because the biggest problem with lyx now, IMHO, is the interchangeability with other applications, and I had hoped that lyx.XML can be easily converted to ODF. And after the discussion, while I agree with Lar's approach, I think the ODF issue has not been fully evaluated. BTW, I am not at Bromarv and I have not attended any development meeting, but I think the meeting should not be a place where people gather around and write code, which can be done anywhere. I was hoping that people can sit down, have some beer, and talk about the development of 1.6.0, 1.7.0 or even 1.8.0. What features are most needed, and why. How the code base should be controlled, etc. I apologize for the long and disoriented email. I just followed my thoughts. Bo
