On Dec 14, 2007 11:52 AM, Jeremiah Foster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello list, and hello Sherm, > > 1. That sucks. I am sorry to hear you feel that way. Not because of > CamelBones but because you sound depressed. I know you have been looking > for work - have you found any? A mailing list is not the best forum for > this kind of discussion perhaps, but I hope you feel better
Thanks for the support. I honestly don't know if how I'm feeling qualifies as clinical depression, or just plain old blues. One reason I brought it up in public is that it's been kind of feeding on itself. There's a bit of a stigma attached to emotional issues, so I've been reluctant to say anything. But keeping quiet meant keeping CB users in the dark about my reasons for the lack of progress. Guilt about keeping y'all in the dark made me feel worse... and so on. Breaking that cycle and being open about what's going on has helped a little. > , you should be proud of CamelBones. Not to boast about it, but... I am proud of it! :-) It's my best technical achievement to date. In terms of social importance and effect on people's lives though, it still takes a back seat to my work on children's web sites at WGBH. That was dead-simple CGI work, but how could I not feel good about helping kids learn to read? > 2. I would be happy to maintain it. It would be a really interesting > project. I have been working with it for a bit, long enough to point out > known bugs at least. :) Fish in a barrel. :-) > I am certain there are more qualified CamelBones > hackers out there, but I am familiar with it and it is something I like > working on. Plus I do some packaging for debian and I know a bit about > the internals of Mac OS X. There was actually a Debian package for 0.3. But, the GNUStep makefile has fallen way out of date, and I'm not sure that the whole "support bundle" scheme is really relevant there anyway. Given the system-wide package and dependency management on Debian (and other Linux distros), there isn't the need to have a single .app bundle that's binary-compatible with a variety of libperl versions, like there is for a Mac OS X CamelBones. 3. I think some kind of team maintainership is good. If Tom wants to > work on it, cool. If others want to work on it, cool. We do this in the > debian perl group and while it is more obvious how to share > responsibility when you are working on lots of packages, I still think > there is a way to work it out with something like CamelBones as well. Even being able to share the job would be a load off my mind. One source of anxiety is just that there's no one else - if I have a breakdown, or get hit by a bus, or whatever, it'd be pretty darned hard for someone else to pick up the pieces. There are a lot of smart people here, and I'm sure the project would go on eventually, but it would be a lot harder than it really should be. One way that people could help out would be documentation. I've been using Drupal (yeah, I know, PHP, boo hiss...) on a community-oriented portal site I built for a friend. Its "book" module actually looks pretty nice for managing community-written docs. There could be more example apps too - the current selection is pretty thin. And, there could be more full-scale apps. A Perl-based office suite would be interesting, and far too big a task for one person. I've always wondered why there are no Perl-based word processors or text editors. Given Perl's facility with text, it seems like it would be a pretty obvious idea. 4. It is really important, I feel, that this project lives on. That's important to me also, which is why I'd rather step down than see it derailed by my current situation and mental state. sherm--
