[pdftex] Extending pdftex

[Andreas Matthias]

Martin Schroeder wrote:

> On 2003-06-30 21:36:20 +0200, Andreas Matthias wrote:
>> Don't hide behind such recurring excuses! You know pretty well
>> that this is not the reasons why the development of pdftex
>> stalled.
> 
> Then please tell us the reasons.

You are the one who can answer this, not me. I just told you
that it is not a lack of volunteers. You are trying to pretend
that but it is not true.

I was willing to help. So I started to read ntg-pdftex for some
time now, in the hope to come to know what you are working on.
But I didn't find out. Reading that mailing list it doesn't 
seem that any help is needed concerning current problems. So
I started to write some extensions I was interesting in. 
Especially I tried to extend pdf inclusion in that annotations
(hyperlinks) are copied, too. There was a short discussion about
that on this mailing list; see thread `pdf inclusion & hyperlinks'.
Nobody said that such a feature is not desired, so I started to work
on it. But when I presented first results of my work on ntg-pdftex
nobody was interested in that. There wasn't even any response. You
simply ignored me.

And since Hans said today `there is no real need to add functionality',
I know why you ignored me. But why didn't you tell that before? If
specially features are not desired, why don't you tell us? If I knew
that before I wouldn't be working on that extension. But since it
always seems that pdftex development is just lacking volunteers I
gave it a try. Now I know better. I still don't know what is
going wrong in pdftex development, but it is definitely not a lack of
volunteers. Or do you think it is correct to just ignore volunteers?

Don't pretend to be looking for volunteers if you are then ignoring
those who try to help!

> I can only speak for the people I know: We have only a limited
> amount of time and do the things _we_ are interested in.

So limited that you cannot even offer a short comment to someone
who was trying to help?

<http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-pdftex/2003-May/000163.html>


Ciao
Andreas