To All:
Thomas, it's sad to hear that you can't devote a lot of time for a
couple years; however, I can understand how many things overshadow the
OS project, and respect your hiatus or moratorium on development (for you).
The project is not dead, far from it. People are making adjustments,
updates, and working on it. The problem is, is that we won't see it
because some changes are going to be taking a lot of time to develop and
test locally. So commits, while they may slow to almost nothing for a
bit, there are people working on tickets or new features or enhancements.
For example, in devel-vnext branch, Till is working on moving to php5
code and using a new configuration system. While you may not notice
changes, they are there. I work for a company that has an OS piece of
software. We don't publish our updates all the time; however, I've
added about 3 features to the code-base that can't be used yet. The
reason is because we don't want to support it yet.
If you know PHP or SQL or AJAX, get involved when you can and just take
a ticket and submit a fix (via this list if Trac isn't open yet).
Otherwise, if you want to make it better, start getting involved in
learning the code and see if you can personally fix some tickets on Trac
and submit them. If you develop software and have extra time and see a
feature that could be needed, or just want to make a "plugin", take some
of that time and create something :)
Just my other 2c.
~Brett
P.s.: Yes, I'm heeding my own words; I'm working on the install script
in my free time.
Michael Baierl wrote:
Thomas,
thanks for your honest reply! I fully understand that issue and it's
not good to hear that this happens for such a great project. I saw the
same happen for smaller projects (i.e. PostfixAdmin) where no active
development happened for quite some time too. Even Squirrelmail has a
similar issue, no real update for quite some time and they still use
<font> tags....
I think the reason why Roundcube has so much focus is that it's the
only app in this area - there are some others, but none of these is
Open Source and can be used on own machines.
Did you already try to find sponsors or other developers via
announcing it on the Roundcube homepage? To me it seems to be critical
to clearly communicate what's going on with a project and what's the
status. Otherwise people might have wrong aspirations.
Thanks for what you did so far and good luck with your other project!
Mike
Thomas Bruederli wrote:
There's one simple answer to this question: It just because nobody
really works on the code. When did you see the last commit that closed
a bug?
Second: releasing means testing, cleaning up, packaging, distributing,
writing an announcement, etc. I don't want to do all that stuff every
time I change two lines of code. But this is not the point. The main
reason why we're still stuck with 0.1-rc1 is that there are no active
developers. Unfortunately I hardly have time to work on the project
and the few minutes that are left, I mostly spend with writing answers
to (stupid) requests.
I don't say it's all the other's fault. I seriously underestimated the
meaning of starting an open source project. It's far more work than
just writing some lines of code and copy them on a server.
Sorry for the bad "service" and the disappointing growth of the
project but I had to shift my priorities away from RoundCube and this
situation will remain for the next two years :-(
In other words: everybody is welcome to take over the project lead and
release more often.
~Thomas
