On 13 May 2012 23:56, Cláudio Pinheiro <[email protected]> wrote: > Rosegarden needs broad visibility by potential users, so it can generate a > critical mass that would attract developers that would maintain a sustained > growth and (even) better codebase and documentation. To achieve it > Rosegarden must walk the multiplatform path. It must be the top priority now > for the future's greater good.
I appreciate this argument, and thank you for articulating it well. But I'm afraid I just don't see the evidence in other applications that broadening your user base, by porting to other platforms with a smaller proportion of developers, helps a great deal with development effort. I think that the difference between Mixxx and Rosegarden is something else. It's focus. Mixxx has a very clear purpose, every developer has pretty much the same focus, and every developer is able to exercise that purpose very clearly in testing the application. So although Mixxx has about the same number of active developers as Rosegarden, they're able to pull it along more efficiently because it's a simpler and smaller application with a much clearer goal. Compare this with Audacity, perhaps the world's most widely-used audio application -- inching along much like Rosegarden does, with a similarly-sized developer team who spend most of their time integrating occasional external contributions and trying to fix the bugs those contributions bring in. Their wider user base gives them a lot more tricky single-platform bug reports and causes years of delays to stable releases. Or the Gimp, spending the last four years on a bunch of changes finally released to a collective response of "is that _it_ for the last four years?" (and I'm sympathetic, but it's true that almost every change in Gimp 2.8 seems to make my life more difficult instead of easier). Or Ardour, a fine application perhaps unique among these in having had a developer working full time on it for many years, but again with only two or three really active developers and not an enormous amount of visibility. No, most of the cross-platform projects are more like Rosegarden than like Mixxx. Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
