On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 01:06:56PM +0000, John Levon wrote: > On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 06:20:30PM +0000, Jose' Matos wrote: > > > I read this and found it interesting as reflection for the next development > > term: > > > > http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/11/writing-successful-open-source.html > > The lack of extensibility within LyX is a serious problem, no doubt. As > some of you may remember I've been harping on about it for a long, long > time, noticably before Firefox became an excellent example of how > extensibility improves a project. > > But we have MUCH bigger fish to fry first, namely Unicode and text > styles. It'd be really disappointing if LyX didn't manage to get these > solved soon, and they really are core features.
Yes and no. It's not even the lack of extensibility that's the basic problem, it is the state of the code base, which tends to repel would-be developers. Which is why we have 0.2 active developers right now... I can today find my way around the code in the sense that I can figure out pretty quickly where, e.g., a certain bug is happening (is it text, text2 or text3? Or perhaps paragraph, paragraph_funcs, or paragraph_something? or buffer_?) you see. It took me quite a while (years?) to get there. Already using SVN will improve things by allowing going to meaningful names. But we also need to refactor, remove/merge multiple implementations of the same things, excise warts ["Need I say it? This is horrible"], remove obsolete #if 0 wastelands, etc. etc. Andre did a hell of a job with cursor/inset unification. Angus did miracles with MVC and GUI-I. And others too if I don't remember all the details. That job should continue if we want more developers. - Martin
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