Enrico Forestieri wrote:
On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 09:49:42PM +0100, José Matos wrote:
On Tuesday 21 August 2007 21:35:46 Enrico Forestieri wrote:
The Qt3 frontend is still available from svn. If there had been a real
interest in further development it would have happened.
At the time there was interest, but it was nevertheless removed.
Enrico, in the interest of historical truth (whatever that is :-) ), I have
suggested (as release manager) to re-enable it for 1.5 after Greve's meeting.
The only person who replied to me was Geog that said that he was no more
interested.
Sure, it would have been easier to keep it alive than trying to rise it
again from the dead.
FWIW, I agree with you on this point. The truth is that Georg was
willing to maintain it but got unmotivated by the removal from trunk.
Nobody stepped up when we proposed to put it back.
But you talk like if it was an easy task to begin with. Believe me, it
was and is still not. And it was very time consuming too. If I may
sumarize the pros about multiple frontends:
- system integration: this is good I guess for commercial application
(even if I have my doubt) but this is open source. The moment the
development effort costs too much with regard to the number of users, I
am sorry to say that this is not worth it. Those users should either
switch to another OS or make their OS (or LyX) good enough for their use
(or pay someone to do it).
- force the kernel/frontend separation: I really think this was a good
thing at the beginning of the GUII work. But at one point, the multiple
frontends approach hampered the development because any change in the
separation layer needed to be fixed *four* times. By concentrating on
getting _one_ frontend clean, I am 100% sure that the kernel/frontend
separation state is much much better now than when we had multiple
frontend. I'd even dare to say that it should be much easier to add a
new frontend now than when we had multiple frontend.
Yes, they are better spent in adding new build systems. I stand in my
opinion that the Qt3 and gtk frontends were murdered.
The difference is that some people _are_ _willing_ to maintain the build
systems. You cannot force anybody to work on anything. Their time is
their time.
This is the only exception I will do. I repeat, you have your truth
and it is not worth continuing this discussion.
OK, let's stop here ;-)
Abdel.
