Andreas Beck wrote:
> Yeah, I know - all that sounds pretty pessimistic. And I always feel pretty
> sad, when it comes to that topic. GGI is "my baby" more than any other open
> source project. And there is quite some blood, sweat and tears I and several
> other people put into it, so it really hurts to see it fall in decay. I'm
> pretty busy these days juggling two jobs, so I don't have so much time left
> to work on GGI. While this is bad for GGI, it helps a little to distract me
> from my "broken heart" about the project's state.
>
> But maybe some folks here would like to cheer me up a little ?
hey Andreas, we need GGI !! :)
Well, having said that, I have to weaken it already. I worked on the Console
abstraction for berlin this summer and we are now in a position where we can
implement it not only by GGI, but SDL, GLUT, cavelib (to see what the later is
good for, it drives this device:
http://www.medialab.chalmers.se/cube/CubeInfo/description.html
So in short, berlin doesn't *depend* on GGI (or any other specific console
access library) any more. However, we'd really appreciate further work on
GGI ! We'v well realized that GGI was a bit neglected recently. And one of
the reasons I see and suspect is the lack of focus. Consider berlin: although
we are still in early development, we advance at a healthy pace, which is (among
others) due to the fact that at least the standard features of a windowing system
and desktop environment are well known, so we know the spots to work on.
in GGI on the other hand, I see lots of little effords here and there, a very high
number of new sub projects, which are unfortunately almost never driven to some
final point of usability (for other than the developers themselfs).
The lack of releases is a good indicator. Just to name a few: GGI2D, GGI3D, XMI,
MesaGGI.
I name these because they could be very interesting for berlin, yet none seems in a
state
where it makes sense for us to found other software on it (we use pluggable renderers
which
implement the 'DrawingKit' interface. We currently have two, one for MesaGGI, the other
for libart on GGI, but Jon told us that MesaGGI wasn't maintained any more...).
> What GGI needs is a driving force. Look at the mailing list. It's quiet.
> Really quiet. The only postings are a few newbies seeking help or asking for
> features, and from time to time, me, Marcus or a few others that annouce
> a little new feature they coded up, because _they_ needed it.
precisely. I do think that the basic ideas behind the GGI project are still valid.
Yet lots of people wonder when I mention GGI, whether the project is still alive
at all.
If you don't find the time to work yourself on it, may be you could try to give the
project some more structure (in terms of project management), a task/request list
for example, and act merely as a coordinator/mentor. I'm sure people will help if
they see that GGI is still actively worked on.
Keep up, we need you !
Stefan
_______________________________________________________
Stefan Seefeld
Departement de Physique
Universite de Montreal
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________________
...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...
