First comment: it's always encouraging to see the generally high level
of discussion on fop-dev, especially when serious issues are involved!
At least for the moment, we are certainly not into flame wars over the
redesign.
Being one of the people who started this ball rolling, I feel obligated
to add my 2 euro-cents worth.
We have enough people depending on FOP staying in a functional state
that we can't just drop the current version while we are trying to
change the architecture. So I agree that we must support (bugfixes,
minor improvements) the current version in the meantime. On the other
hand, I've seen enough of the code to think that adding significant new
functionality is going to be difficult. In any case, it would be lots of
effor that will be thrown away, once we get the new architecture off the
ground.
I also really want to believe that we can and will get that architecture
going. I've been travelling a lot in the last month and that has
certainly not helped me move the design along. It's always there in a
corner of my mind, but I find (like Arved said too) that most of my
actual FOP hours are spent reading the mail, trying to clarify things or
fix minor problems. There are lots of table-related questions right now
and I seem to be handling most of them. If I'm going to work more on
design, someone else is going to have to step in there, since tables are
one of those "must-haves" for practically all FOP users.
As for trying to get some companies/money behind existing or new
developers, I'm not opposed. I've talked about it in my company, but
while we are interested in FOP, so far it hasn't been enough on our
critical path to pay me to work on it. But I can always try again; paths
can change. That would certainly help a lot; it's really hard to do
signficant design work in the odds and ends of time I'm currently able
to free up.
But I'll try, as Arved suggested, to make some more ideas public. Or
perhaps just to create a branch to play around in, so that it will feel
more "real". Maybe we are suffering a bit from the "blank page"
syndrome.
Regards,
Karen - committer still committed!
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