Survey for preparing FreeMarker development effort

Dear All,

While I'm not one of the original authors of the 2.x.x (non-classic)
line, seems I have gradually become the main maintainer of the
FreeMarker template engine over the last few years or so, as the
original authors (I mostly mean Jonathan and Attila) are inactive
around here. Only I couldn't allocate enough time for this either, and
this starts to become a problem for FreeMarker.

So, to catch up, I plan to allocate serious amount of time [*] for
FreeMarker development stating from late spring or early summer. The
goal of this effort is fixing long-standing issues (mostly design
issues that can be addressed without breaking backward compatibility
too much), adding frequently requested missing features (an those that
people don't request but I know they need it... :) ), increasing
usability (better error messages, better documentation, terminology
simplification) and to make FreeMarker more accessible for potential
contributors (fixing the branching mess, switching to Maven, Git,
modularization, addressing ownership/licensing and CLA issues).

Thus, as the first step, I would like to hear about what the wishes of
you as FreeMarker user are. What features you crave for the most, how
could FreeMarker integrate better with your product, what are the
things you or your fellow developers most often has problems with,
etc. (Of course, I do have a long list of things to fix/improve, but I
don't want to influence the discussion at this point.)

*: How much time, you might ask. I'm thinking of a few hundred hours
   here. Yeah, that's bold. What life will allow (work, family, etc.),
   is another question. We will see.

-- 
Thanks,
 Daniel Dekany


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