Dear swfmill-Community, as you all know, swfmill hasn't seen a release in all of 2006. That is a very bad thing, for two major reasons: * People that dont track the prereleases (probably the majority of users) don't profit from all the enhancements and fixes. * People start thinking swfmill is dead- while it's just stabilizing.
I'd say the causes for this are also two: * swfmill is somewhere near feature-complete: it actually does what it was designed to (mainly importing assets), it does so ok, and there's little reason to change it. a few corner cases break swfmill and surely there are more bugs to be found, Adobe will come up with new versions and tags all the time (the new vm bytecodes are still unsupported), SVG import could suck less, etc. pp., but (as i think most people on this list can confirm) for most of it's "traditional" use cases it should work just fine. * my personal involvement has dropped considerably. please allow me one paragraph of lamenting: i've spent somewhere near 1k unpaid hours on swfmill. around a year ago i've tried earning some money with swfmill- one company offered to pay me 500E/month for a while to continue the (at that time, pretty fast) pace of swfmill development (and feature their logo). sadly, the guy that initiated the idea (and lobbied his company) left the corp before the paperwork was done, so it never happened. i've received two "donations" coupled to specific support/development questions, 100EUR and 100USD respectively, and one "real" (uncoupled) donation weighting 10EUR. I live cheap for german standards, but need (that is, for food and shelter) about double that amount a month. The two bigger donations took about a week of focus each. The idea was to pay some of the swfmill development time by cashing in on the increased "image". Do the maths. Now stop the lamenting! I found well-paid contract work early last year that still pays my life, so i really cannot complain. It wasnt swfmill-(or even flash-)related at all, and of course the code now belongs to the customer, and it's hopeless to lobby him into opensourcing it in any way. But after, i could focus away from the money onto other projects. As swfmill is "done" (see above), now there is (as many of you likely know) xinf. So. I learned a lesson: Dont do open-source for the money. The other lesson i learned with swfmill, though, is: open-source might just work. Many of you have contributed, in some way or the other, even if only by generating testcases for bugs. Steve's involvement shows that it's possible for an outsider to gain a deep-enough understanding of swfmill to be able to extend it to a new flash version (and fix other stuff). So swfmill surely got a lot better by being open. Of course, i also shouldn't neglect that probably nobody would know about swfmill today if it wasn't free (at least as in beer). So much for the past, now let's think about swfmill's future. Which is in *your* hands, as my involvement will rather continue to decline than increase. Now, it's probably not yet time to look for a new maintainer, but i do need some help: * test the latest prerelease (0.2.11.22), and *report if it works*. As the useOutlines issue showed, my fear of introducing regressions is not completely psychological. I want to see at least about 5 reports of "i use swfmill in this-or-that-context, and 0.2.11.22 works flawless" before finally going 0.2.12. If you want to help more, start organizing the construction of an extended set of simple test cases for automatic regression tests. * swfmill needs documentation. there is a lot floating around, but it needs a loving hand of collecting and organizing it into something like a manual. Please, someone, step forward and take on this issue. It could be one weekend of work, but would make an incredible difference and you could be certain of the thanks of many a newbie. * (obviously, if you can fix/contribute anything in the code---) when and if swfmill gets a release and some better docs, it is back on the road to being a stable tool. is that in your interest? if you need help helping swfmill, let me know. -dan -- http://0xDF.com/ http://iterative.org/ _______________________________________________ swfmill mailing list swfmill@osflash.org http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/swfmill_osflash.org
