OK, thanks for the prompt Wolfgang. I had decided to give myself a pause to think, but hadn't intended it to be so long.
I want to focus on the jQuery issue, and hope that by addressing it we can cover some of the other points that were raised. >From my perspective, the key issue seems to be a concern over whether the addition of jQuery to the TiddlyWiki core code has provided sufficient benefit to end-users to warrant the additional kilobytes added to the core. The concern is sufficiently serious to trigger talks of a fork. Digging deeper, I can see concerns that the integration of jQuery is a deep and drastic change, and that the work is being released in an unfinished, unpolished way that is leading to instabilities. There's a few basic beliefs that underpin my reaction to this: - the key benefit of adding the plugin system to TiddlyWiki back in 2005 was to bring back the various variants that had forked from the original code, and allow them to share a common platform, making it easy to upgrade and mix and match - that the power of tiddlywiki lies as much in the universe of plugins available for it as in the core code itself - that the core development should continue to serve the needs of end users directly, but must also listen to plugin writers in order to look after that ecosystem - generally, an open source platform like tiddlywiki should be extended in a fairly conservative manner, to take care not to cause incompatibilities across the base of existing users - the discussion here is dotted with some deep misunderstandings about the goals and implementation of the jQuery integration, which has perhaps led to more fear and uncertainty than i'd expected Having got that out of the way, there's a couple of important mea culpas, particularly in relation to the last point: - Bugs, particularly regression bugs, have crept into recent releases. This is a clear failure on my part, and we're addressing it by enhancing the TiddlyWiki test suites and by pulling back some changes that have turned out to be flakey - Communication has been poor, again Osmosoft needs to do more to discuss proposed changes. We kicked off a discussion in the dev group back in January, but it's clear now that the discussion wasn't broad enough to involve enough people in the community, becoming a rather dense technical thread Sadly, part of the cost of my move to BT has clearly been that I have far less time to spend myself on the TiddlyWiki discussion groups. (One of the upsides of course is that I've been able to keep an entire team of developers working on stuff built on TiddlyWiki and TiddlyWeb; some of the other offers I considered would have entailed me having to pretty much drop TiddlyWiki in favour of the favoured technology of my new employer). My most impassioned observation is that I think we need to do everything we can do avoid forking. Ever since the dawn of the systemConfig mechanism, I've felt that one of the wondrous things about all those varied TiddlyWiki's you see out on the web is that they are all fundamentally compatible, that one can do this mixing and matching plugins to create unique variants. Having a single platform that works on all browsers is a huge win in terms of keeping the environment simple and approachable. There's been a lot of discussion about the extent to which the core code can or should take advantage of jQuery. I've personally been a bit disappointed: I wasn't expecting it to be a walk in the park, but it's proved to be fairly tricky and intricate to switch existing core code to use jQuery. Having said that, I'd like to argue that jQuery still brings benefits in the area of people writing TiddlyWiki plugins (and perhaps in future extensions to the core code). The proposition of jQuery for plugin writers is that it makes it easier to do a lot of the DOM manipulation that is often needed in plugins, and particularly makes it easier to do these manipulations in a way that works across all browsers. (TiddlyWiki incorporates it's own mechanisms to simplify browser compatibility, but they are non-standard and brittle compared to jQuery). Although plugins could make their own arrangements for using jQuery without any core support, it made it hard to coordinate and share the use of jQuery between plugins. From the plugin writers perspective, if you're going to use jQuery it's convenient if it's part of the furniture, something that you can rely on always being there. I've made these points before, and perhaps the mood of this thread suggests that I have failed to bring forward convincing arguments. In retrospect, perhaps we should have kept the jQuery integration in beta for a lot longer. We are where we are, though, and we can only undo the addition of jQuery to the core by creating another incompatibility crease, or a fork. We're thinking in terms of a 2.5.3 release next week to bring together the recent bug fixes, but not to make any major changes. That clears the decks for our next step. I can understand the call for officially forking the core, but I fear that it will bring confusion to end users, over what is in practice a fairly arcane issue for most of them. One core with many plugins is a much simpler model to grok that multiple cores with multiple mutually incompatible plugins. A slightly lighter weight mechanism might be to somehow pull the 2.5.x releases back into beta. All of these thoughts jumble around but perhaps it's also worth pointing out some things that might not be so obvious to outsiders: I use TiddlyWiki every day, I work on it's code, or plugin code, almost every day, often over the shoulder of an Osmosoftonian (it still feels like I'm Chief Debugger in the team). I care as much as anyone about the thing, perhaps more so. I don't want to destablise it, but neither do I want it to atrophy, and become a web 2.0 curiosity that never made it through to the next wave. I think TiddlyWiki embodies some deep and important ideas about user interfaces, about collaboration, and how to build software. I want it to be useful for as long as I'm around to care about it. Furthermore, my career at BT is intimately tied up with TiddlyWiki. Things always take longer than I expect, but we have managed to bring TiddlyWiki right into the heart of a crusty old institution. There's individual TiddlyWiki users scattered across BT, and some bigger things like TiddlyDocs that are powered by TiddlyWiki. BT must seem like a weird bedfellow sometimes to other people in the community, and there are undoubtedly some bumps and knocks as we settle into place, but I can't help thinking that the long term picture for TiddlyWiki is brighter with BT's interest. I hope that the way that I worked tirelessly on TiddlyWiki for three years before the acquisition shows that my interest and love for TiddlyWiki transcends my corporate ownership, too. Cheers Jeremy On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 6:03 PM, wolfgang<[email protected]> wrote: > >> There's a lot more to say, but it's late, and possibly best said in >> another thread anyway. I wanted to acknowledge that I'm reading all >> this, and thinking about it deeply. I'll try to post some more >> coherent thoughts in a day or two, and thanks for bearing with the >> discussion. >> >> Best wishes >> >> Jeremy > > Hi Jeremy, > > what are your feelings now. I for my part would still be interested to > hear your ideas on all of this. > > regards.. > > > -- Jeremy Ruston mailto:[email protected] http://www.tiddlywiki.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
