1. I thought it would be good to collect somewhere, some possible things to work on in Ion3plus, if anyone can be arsed. Please post what you'd like to see here, and I'll comment if would include a quality patch. Maybe someone can one day be arsed to code the feature or modification, if it's known that it has a chance of getting there. (Things that are clearly separable into modules, should be implemented as separate modules, whether they are included in the main package or not.)
No, given the current state and trend of fonts [1], Xft still snowball's chance in hell of getting in. That's politics for you (which is what you get for imposing too much policy in software!). Xinerama also isn't going back in, especially not after what the shitheads in power did to Xrandr: turning it into Shitorama 2.0. However, as Ion3plus is a sort of "wiki branch" that I won't be actively maintaining, and perhaps not even making releases of, I may include patches that I might not otherwise care to maintain; those, however, are unlikely to get further into Ion4. [1]: http://iki.fi/tuomov/b/archives/2008/03/20/T13_47_17/ 2. Yes, I think I will at least try to write Ion4, since I have some nice ideas that I can't resist testing out... :). Indeed, with Ion4 I plan to get back into working on "research code", and will also try to simplify things, further removing features. Throughout Ion2 and, especially, Ion3, the project grew too much into a proper complex and bloated software development project, and I don't really have time or even interest for such gruntwork. Research and testing out new ideas is what I prefer to do. Don't hold your breath. Ion4, if it happens, is likely to take quite some time to near even a preview release, and I think I prefer to work in peace, and I'll only release it, once it's almost finished. That could indeed be 2016, as joked in the stable Ion3 release announcement thread. That's how much time I seem to be able to spare for coding, and I do have a few other very slowly proceeding coding projects. (And since working on the code is very intermittent, it always takes more time to recall what you were going to do, than you actually spend writing code.) A slow progress rate will especially be the case, if I have to do it all myself... I'd really just like to move to the management department already :). Indeed, the rate of contributions to Ion3plus can affect when and with what kind of license (if any) Ion4 is released, and if the source will be released at all (or just a Cygwin or so binary). Some of the suggestions I will list for Ion3plus in a later post, may be part of Ion4 (but they are non-essential nice things, that do not form the new core ideas). Here's your chance to prove that FOSS isn't a completely lost cause, as it has lately started to appear [2]. [2]: http://iki.fi/tuomov/b/archives/2007/06/01/T19_09_43/ 3. I will provide a list of some suggestions I have for Ion3plus, some of which might get into Ion4, in another post. -- Tuomo
