On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 3:08 AM, Etienne Samson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi !
>
> Update from me, as I had been the primary workforce of QS's branch
> development ;-). My opinion is that I'm a little sad to see QS slowly dying,
> especially since it has been one of the first application (that I know of)
> to provide such a powerful integration with the system. I'm still planning
> to do some work on QS, but as I now have a real work ongoing, I can't really
> afford the time to some of my others (dare I say "geeky") projects ;-).
> What I would like to see (since this thread is so aptly named), is some kind
> of discussion about QS's future, if there are people willing to give some
> help in development (because this is what I tried to do, but failed, for
> some reasons I'll try to explain thereafter), and try to move on.

I certainly don't want Quicksilver to die because of a lack of
maintenance, and I'm sure there are others that feel the same way. I
don't know much Cocoa yet though, so I wouldn't be the _ideal_ person
to contribute to the project.

> There have been several shortcoming with my developments : I didn't have
> access to QS's own update mechanism. This means that although I provided
> some builds from my work, very few people have found them, and this meant
> people kept refiling bugs I had fixed in the branch. I also had a few issues
> with Howard stating "stick with the last official build" (that's not against
> you, but I could have understood it as "you're doing this for nothing since
> nobody will use your build", and I had a hard time with this ;-)).
>
> I guess I also went overthrown with some of my changes (I tried to fix some
> of the ugly stuff, like the wierd class hierarchy around QSCommand (which
> seems it was added after, while providing the main object/action/argument
> paradigm, which is the base of QS), tweaking the ranking system (means it
> doesn't match as well as it does between ß54 and ß55a*).
>
> Now I'm wondering on what can be done, we could continue working on QS
> ß54/55, or try to complete the trunk version and release QS "v2" (since we
> could call the ß54 series "v1"), but this has some pitfalls :
>
> The plugin system in incompatible, this means that every plugin from (what
> I'll call v1 from now) will need to be updated for v2. There are numerous
> unimplemented stuff in Crucible, and stuff that needs to be updated (no
> triggers, or at least need to be checked, since Alcor wanted to provide that
> as a system-wide Preference Panel, allowing for a trigger that could launch
> QS).
>
> I'm not really against ditching v1 totally in favor of the new architecture,
> because that means I can restart a development cycle (I had been breaking
> people's triggers file while trying to fix encapsulated triggers).
>
> Opinions ?
>
> Etienne

I -really- don't mean to hijaack this thread, but I would need to get
answers about some of the problems I mentioned in the "Build problems
and other issues" thread before I could give many helpful suggestions
about the future of QS... Is the SVN code really so terribly broken as
I saw? Or is it just incomplete? The latter would make sense to me (as
I wasn't aware that the current SVN code was so radically different
from the ß54/55 series.

If v2 -is- as incomplete as it seems, perhaps the generic solution is
to have two dev teams. Have a few developers maintain ß54/55 until the
v2 code is fully usable. Once v2 is viable, start stating that ß54/55
are based on legacy code and will be phased out. After a while, simply
stop maintaining ß54/55 and work solely on v2. At this point, there
should be no reason not to switch to v2.

- Steven

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