Hi everybody..
As we use OpenSG in our own animation system, which drives most of our
(commercial) projects, I'm very glad about this discussion and I'm sure
that it keeps as polite and friendly as this mailing list has always
been, so let's omit the flamebait (-1) warnings.
First of all, I agree with absolutely all points stated by Allen and
Marcus and as a (quite) long time user / daily mailing list reader I
want to add a point that is IMHO crucial for the future of OpenSG:
Documentation. Ok, there's a very good (beginner) tutorial by Oli (many
kudos) but it's definitely not enough. Although I normally have an open
browser with the OpenSG doxygen documentation on the second screen, I
normally end up using grep -r and find -name "test*" if I want to know
something about the usage of a feature/function/class ... Btw., I think
that the lack of (design) documents is not only a problem for users, but
also for developers that want to contribute. After three years of using
OpenSG (ok, not exclusively, there were also other important things to
do) I'm now at a point where I try to extend things myself (which is
sometimes successful and sometimes not) as I believe to understand some
of the internals and the code is not just a huge intimidating monster.
Nevertheless, this knowledge comes from reading this list and searching
for explanations in the code and not by something like a developer
documentation or announcement of a new feature (including a proper
example). In my opinion, OpenSG would be nearly unusable without this
mailing list.
As I read the mail from Allen, I had a look at www.opensg.org (which is
really a pain). I remembered that I saw a mostly unused wiki some time
ago (and indeed, it is still there. Last change: one year ago). Maybe
this would be a good starting point for a more community driven approach
to explain things for users and a developer driven approach to explain
core concepts to potential new developers. Allen is completely right if
he says that every developer for "them" ("they" are everywhere...) is
one developer less for OpenSG, but regular users need an other, easier
understandable way to become developers than those who wrote it from
scratch.
Ok, so to add my 0.02€ to the "What can we do" for the future of OpenSG
* Let's start to document the beast.
* Let's reactivate the wiki (howtos, examples, roadmap...).
Yours,
Dominik
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