On Saturday 02 May 2009 00:30:04 Alex Fernandez wrote: > Thanks to all those who voted for inclusion of eLyXer in LyX. Thanks > go specially to Uwe Stöhr for his whole-hearted support of eLyXer. > > Let me now withdraw my offer to include eLyXer in LyX. There are many > reasons for this; let me explain them the long way since I think the > issue is important. > > First, this discussion (and the many threads around it) are causing > unnecessary division among LyX developers. People are suffering > unnecessary pain because of this. And this because everyone is trying > to do the right thing for LyX, but nobody agrees what this thing is. I > think we all need to take a step back and try to find out what the > best way to help users.
Personally I found this discussion to be quite civil. :-) > Second, a poll (despite the obvious good intentions behind it) is the > wrong way to go about an issue like this one. As long as people have > valid concerns they have to be answered; and if those concerns are > invalid then they have to be explained away. But just winning 5-to-4 > is no guarantee that the outcome will be positive. The best way to win one of this discussion is to show code and you have done that. :-) > Third, to make eLyXer as useful as possible it _needs_ to have a > separate life from LyX. Even if it has no meaning without LyX. This is > because the goals of each project are different in a few crucial > respects. For one, eLyXer should support most known versions of LyX > documents _at the same time_. When support for LyX 1.6 was added, the > now obsolete 1.5 format was kept for backwards compatibility. If > eLyXer resided within LyX then that support would be ditched since > lyx2lyx already keeps compatibility. But then an eLyXer user would > need the whole LyX infrastructure to read a LyX document. Similarly, > eLyXer can be a valuable resource for people who want to read LyX > documents but do not have LyX (because they don't want, or because > they cannot run it). Remember, Python runs on many more platforms than > LyX; having a way to visualize documents on those platforms would make > LyX more useful. A technical note, please don't make the mistake to support several lyx file formats at the same time. LyX has done that for some time and I can tell you that the resulting code will be a nightmare to maintain quite soon. My suggestion is for you to take any of the stable release file format and to focus on that. The lyx2lyx code is almost self-contained and in the worst scenario you could keep a private copy of lyx2lyx, the license of lyx2lyx is GPL2+ so it should be possible. Better yet would it be to integrate it with lyx's version of lyx2lyx. Note also that I am quite eager to create a stable API to export to other applications. Here elyxer could a client of the lyx2lyx code. I am open to this possibility. :-) > I naïvely thought that eLyXer could survive integration and still keep > a separate life. Code could be exchanged (as from trunk to branch, and > back) and everyone's codebases and lives would get richer in the > process. After Uwe's exposition I see that it is quite impossible. > > IMHO LyX needs a way to output HTML to maximize its usefulness. If a > new way to output HTML natively emerges then it will probably have > been worth it to cause this infight. Meanwhile joint distribution > would fulfill our common goals nicely. I will support Uwe as much as > possible to bundle eLyXer in the Windows installer, and the same for > Linux distributions, which should eventually reach most users. Joint > distribution might go as far as bundling the main elyxer.py file in > released versions. I agree that a better conversion to html is a bonus. > If the LyX community still wants to integrate eLyXer and it causes no > conflicts (i.e. everyone agrees on it) I will happily offer it again. > But in this circumstances I think it is best if the two codebases stay > separate. I am sorry for all the conflict that I have caused, I should > have thought the thing over (and especially any adverse consequences) > before making my offer. In my eagerness to offer something back to the > community (and also to earn some recognition) I rubbed some people the > wrong way. Now all I can do is apologize and try to help mend the > bridges. Your effort to improve lyx is appreciated. On the other hand note that some of objections drawn here are valid and try to work to solve them. Don't be afraid to ask questions this list is quite friendly (really, I am not making this up). :-) > Thanks for getting this far, If I was an old guy I could tell you that there were previous discussion in the past regarding other issues. Like the fact that lyx2lyx is python and how much time it took to integrate it with LyX. But since I am not I telling you this. ;-) > Alex. Regards, -- José Abílio
