On Tue, 2009-09-15 at 22:25 +0100, Russell Hafter - Lists wrote: > Surely the developers have better things to do than deal > with those who either have no time to do the work that needs > doing or those who do not have the necessary expertise?
Frankly, we'd take anything we get right now. Contrary to popular belief, we have no desire to ditch the RISC OS frontend out of hand. Additionally, we have a great deal of experience in introducing new developers to our codebase and ways of working. Given the RISC OS frontend has had almost no development for the last 2.5 years, it's somewhat miraculous that it's taken this long for the lack of maintenance to become a serious issue. It is now becoming an issue -- hence why we've asked for help (be that one person or a number of people -- we're not fussy). Without maintenance, the problem will only get worse: introduction of DOM and major layout engine upheaval followed by JavaScript will require changes to the way in which platform frontends interface with the core system. If noone's maintaining a given frontend then, whilst we go to exteme effort to avoid breakage, things will break, and there will be noone to fix them. In the case of the RISC OS frontend, things are currently being made worse by the fact that common functionality is being moved into the core. This makes platform frontends simpler in general. As part of the transition, we require the platform frontends to be updated to work with the new core functionality. Unfortunately, there is nobody to do this for the RISC OS frontend, which prevents us from merging the new functionality into the main development stream. This holds everything else back, and we're reaching the end of our tolerance for such obstructions. John.
