On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 01:25:58PM +0100, John Levon wrote:
>
> This isn't true: the licensing scheme is clearly documented. We were and
> are well aware of its drawbacks.
I didn't exactly start questioning the QT effort yesterday, as you well know.
No one would doubt your understanding of the documented license and its
drawbacks. But you say "we were aware". Comments here indicate that some
community members are contemplating the issues for the first time.
> > My point two years ago was that a major toolkit independence effort would
> > effectively bring about a "feature freeze" in LyX.
>
> Yeah, right. You must be keeping your head in the ground. I won't even
> bother listing the huge amounts of new features and improvements that
> has happened concurrently with the GUII effort, or the large benefits to
> the source code itself.
My head is not "in the ground". We obviously have longstanding, dramatic
differences in our goals and objectives for LyX. You shouldn't ignore or
dismiss these differences.
Yes, there certainly have been major improvements in the source code, lots of
"clean up", etc. The "GUII" effort, as you call it.
But you'd be hard pressed to offer a host of significant new features, from the
user's standpoint, introduced in the last two years.
> One specific example of where innovation has been hindered by the GUII
> framework would be nice.
You want an example of innovation that would have occurred, "but for"? Cute,
John.
It's not just the GUII effort at fault here. It's just one chapter. LyX has
suffered numerous efforts to circle back and clean up the code, rewrite "hacks"
dependent on xforms, etc. The community has often seemed incapable of building
on the foundation in place, rather than tearing it down and reconstructing it
ad nauseum.
GUII has been one more excuse not to "settle" with the code in place, but to go
back and rewrite it, in the process of separating it from GUI elements.
In fact, I'm not necessarily the one lacking historical perspective, John.
Do you recall the attempt -- five years ago or more? -- to do a major rewrite
that was scuttled? The coding effort reverted back to the in-place,
functional--hack-laden--code, in the interests of continuing to improve LyX
over a reasonable time frame. (I had, at the time, written a passionate piece
advocating just such a reversion, in the interests of continuing innovation).
I consider what's happened in recent years (probably more than two, in fact) to
be another instance of the same phenomenon as that earlier rewrite. But this
time, the impetus to reinvent the wheel won out.
Sure, LyX today is very nice, sparkling and clean, at least under the hood.
But I believe that my publicly expressed fears that this would be a long, drawn
out process -- much longer than anyone thought -- while the ground moved from
under LyX, has indeed been vindicated.
One reason for my renewed interest in the LyX community was a sense that,
finally, a code foundation and GUII may have matured to the point that new and
creative thinking "outside the box" might begin to thrive again. (Although I
think far too much time has passed, unfortunately, for the more outrageous
ambitions many of us once held for LyX to ever come to fruition).
It was interesting for me to jump in again and start using LyX 1.3.2. Heck,
John, I've even been using the QT version(!)
It was nice to see the ERT inset, the preferences dialog, new and improved ways
of presenting various menu items, which still seem familiar to me. Nice new
visual cues for some of the embedded formating.
It was somewhat distressing, though, to look at 1.4.0cvs (qt build). It's made
me question whether LyX has, in fact, stabilized and put aside its incessant
reinvention of itself. Once again, it seems that that all sorts of changes are
afoot in the various menus and controls.
One that particularly struck me was the elimination of the Layout menu and its
diaspora throughout the user interface ("Edit->Paragraph Settings" Seriously?)
Why such fundamental user interface elements are still being tweaked is beyond
me. It must reflect the kind of dramatic differences in goals and objectives I
mentioned above.
For what it's worth, this "new" LyX, doesn't look so familiar to me.
> > What bothers me the most is the prospect of a casual attitude toward the GPL
> > and so-called "relicensing" procedures. I believe that there is insufficient
> > attention to the fact that a small handful of "no responses" or outright
> > rejections from individual developers would tarnish the entire effort.
>
> This is how licenses work. Licenses are an unfortunate necessary evil.
A casual attitude toward the GPL is how licenses work? I don't understand your
point. And many consider the GPL a good, not an unfortnate, necessary evil.
