On Sat, 27 Oct 2001, Brian Proffitt wrote:
> What is the overall strategy of the GIP?
Asger and John have answered this pretty well.
> What are the most challenging aspects of the GIP?
Convincing the nay-sayers that it was worthwhile in the first place
then spending three years trying to build a team of developers to get
the GUII work done.
GUII makes you think beyond the limits of your favourite toolkit. It
makes you think beyond a simple port to an alternate toolkit which is
what happened with KLyX and what several people wanted to do for a
Gnome/GTK+ port. GUII is a very large step toward platform/system
independence.
Persistence, publicity (mostly through LyX Development News -- some
might say propaganda) and persperation eventually won the battle of
minds.
> Is there a timeline for completing the project?
:-)
I thought we'd have had it done years ago but it took ages to get a
team of enthusiastic porters together and a couple of people who were
prepared to build the infrastructure.
The timeline goes (vertically) something like:
dialogs, toolbar + menubar
workarea
The workarea is the major remaining area. Most dialogs are
independent and being revised/improved. The toolbar/menubar
abstractions are pretty good but could use some more refining.
The dialogs are now, largely due to the brilliant design work of Angus
Leeming, a snap to port. Angus was responsible for the MVC
implementation that Asger talks about in his email.
> Regarding LyX overall, what are some of the features you think users will
> appreciate the most when they use this application?
They can stop messing about with fiddly document layout crap and get
down to the task of writing the content. LyX and LaTeX will get the
document to look beautiful in about 98% of cases from my own
experience and in the remianing 2% you tweak a couple of LaTeX
settings (for cases where LaTeX needs some user assistance in placing
figures for example).
Hebrew and Arabic support. Support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean
via an unofficial patch (this work will be superceded or at least
incorporated sometime in the future).
> What's the biggest thing you want to change for LyX?
Better integration with LaTeX. I want support for more LaTeX document
classes and to do this we need some tools to help LyX users get LyX
working with new classes easily.
Ummm... Actually, the thing I'd most like to change is the apparently
general misconception that LyX is going nowhere and doesn't do
anything useful anyway. Converts to LyX love the way they can
concentrate on the content but it requires a change of mindset and
operational model from that most word processors inflict upon their
hapless users. To a small extent the above wish would also help
overcome this because LyX is currently geared toward technical content
such as for engineering and science texts and journals.
Dekel Tsur's work to support multi-lingual documents and in particular
the support for Hebrew and Arabic documents are significant also.
How many other free software editors of _any_ description can handle
Hebrew, let alone typeset it beautifully?
> How many people are working on LyX now and how is the work organized?
There are about 15 significant current contributors to LyX. These
could all be called core developers although if you just count those
of us with CVS write access as core developers I think you'd get
about 8.
There are essentially four teams involved in LyX development (where
the word "team" is used rather loosely). A documentation team led by
Mike Ressler. An internationalisation team consisting of translators
for the interface and documentation. A debugging/testing team
consisting of a number of bleeding-edge users, this isn't really a
formal team. Michael Schmitt is the main man in the test team as he
maintains a list of bugs and has run extensive Purify tests for us.
The development team has several specialists, such as Juergen Vigna
(who wrote all the table code), but every one of the core developers
work in any area of the code (including Juergen). Of the 20 major
contributors I'd say 5 spend most of their time working on the GUII
ports.
Jean Marc Lasgouttes has control of the stable releases (currently
1.1.6) and handles most of the user contributed patches. Lars has
overall control.
There are a couple of feature articles in LyX Development News that
try to explain the development process we are using. Take a look
through the various issues:
http://www.lyx.org/news/archive.php3
The main ones to look are probably:
http://www.lyx.org/news/20000217.php3
for the original announcement of change of development process
http://www.lyx.org/news/20001220.php3
coverage of yet another GUII debate and some details of why it is a
good thing.
> If you could answer these questions even partially, it would be of great
> help. Since I expect multiple replies, please be sure to identify yourself
> and your relationship to the project so I can attribute the right
> information to the right person.
Allan Rae, LyX core developer since early 1997 (or was it 1996?).
GUII freak/advocate, author of the first 4 iterations of GUII dialog
class designs. GUII leader until I went into semi-retirement in
January 2001 when I handed over to Angus. LyX Development News editor.
Currently trying to get my much-neglected PhD thesis finished.
Allan. (ARRae)
