PicoGUI1 and 2

Please bear in mind Om and Pg2 will take at least one year to be
usable enough to be interesting, and twice as much to
stabilize.  During that development cycle, Pg1 will *NOT* go
unmaintained; what will happen is that it will be declared
"stable" and we (meaning Micah and me) don't plan to dedicate
too much time to adding new features to it.

This specifically implies:

1. we will fix bugs as we see them.

  In fact, I plan to switch my desktop to Pg1 as soon as Nifty
  can serve my needs and I find a way to run a browser; so I
  will be using it on a daily basis, which means bugs *will* get
  fixed.

2. nothing stops other people from adding features they want to
see.  In fact, I'm willing to vote on Carpman for official Pg1
maintainer ;-)

  When the codebase is stable and the build system is sane, it
  should be less scary for new developers to tackle pgserver or
  cli_c development, so we're hoping Pg1 can survive and even
  grow even when it's not at the center of our attention
  anymore.

  Sure, some documentation would be cool too.  Most of the code
  is very readable, but personally I find anything involving
  divtrees to be very good at warping my brain.  However, if
  Micah were to write such documentation, it would hardly be of
  any use, as he is too involved (therefore the code seems
  obvious to him); I've seen this happen too often.  I'd be
  willing to reward the author of a good "pgserver internals
  reference" document in some symbolic way (t-shirt?)

3. We have to face it; Pg1 *is* almost stable already.  It needs
three or four features perhaps, but most of what is missing is
at the client side.  The PicoGTK hack was a good example of what
should be happening to Pg1 in the next months, and this kind of
thing benefits more from a stabilized codebase than from one
that is a moving target.

  In a sense, the knowledge that Micah and I are keeping our
  fingers busy with Om and Pg2 should make users feel *safer*,
  because they know their environment won't be changing
  radically and incompatibly under their feet every few weeks.

  Alternatively, if we instead keep adding features to Pg1, the
  inevitable result is bloat.  We don't want that.

[]s,
                                               |alo
                                               +----
--
            Those who trade freedom for security
               lose both and deserve neither.
--
http://www.laranja.org/                mailto:[email protected]
         pgp key: http://www.laranja.org/pessoal/pgp

Eu jogo RPG! (I play RPG)         http://www.eujogorpg.com.br/
GNU: never give up freedom                 http://www.gnu.org/


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