[texworks] TeXwork is Under-Resourced - Was: LaTeX log parser script

[Paul A Norman]

Hi,

This whole project is under-resourced, too much falls on Stefan and
Charlie, and very few other volunteers.

If you have a cart that needs three horses, and you only have one horse,
there is no point in whipping the one remaining horse.

People need to realise that this is a real problem - Stefan really does not
have time to send courtesy emails to document maintaners, I do not have
time to scour source code and other sources.

I am counting my self out on all that follows here, so am not trying to
achieve anything for myself ...

The situation is that TeXworks has an absentee Owner/Landlord, while the
roof is not complete, the all the walls are not up. (E.g. Spell checking
development on the HunSpell engine is frozen as TeXworks was meant to be
moving to another spelling engine. So User's have not even been able to
add words to their spell dictionaries, choose alternatives without doing
cartwheels and have no User lists available. - Just one example).  Stefan
long ago identified great improvements to TeXworks that are needed to keep
it up with the play but he and Charlie have no time to implement such
things.

TeXworks is the flagship editor of TUG, now promoted widely, and in
distributions of *TeX.

That means that more responsibility for the needs of the project need to be
borne by the relevant people, office bearers and their organisations. Too
much is left randomly to the availability of TeXworks volunteers who often
end up being treated like fools in the situation.

Either the absentee copyright Owner consistently and actively participates,
or releases the project, and in any event  TUG places it on a proper
FOSS governance model somewhat like Libre Office, or TUG needs to fork the
project (as Open Source under the same license)  and   place it on a proper
FOSS governance model somewhat like Libre Office.

Whatever TUG, and whoever else, need to be approached to see that the
venture is more properly resourced and have no doubt that includes $

It needs web hosting capabilities as perhaps provided by outfits
like HostGator which would enable so much (including php, etc, and editable
wikis, the list is long).  The TeXworks.org domain name could be directed
as such.

It needs proper funding of the developers, (C++ Stefan and Charlie ..., on
sometimes  a  per script basis for Script developers, and documenters
for manuals, C++ api, Script api, (people doing things as Alain, Stefan and
I did). TeXworks can look to the Blender FOSS project for examples of this.

It needs a proper governance model as perhaps like Libre Office with a
board that  builds in a range of people that encompasses Major stake
holders TUG, MiKTeX, TeXLive etc,  C++ developers, documenters,
script extenders, and the all important Users.

TeXworks needs to agonisingly move into the 21st century of OpenSource
models.

Paul

On 3 March 2012 13:50, Paul A Norman <paul.a.norman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you Stefan,
>
> The function added to Scriting is in fact very important, and has long
> been needed.
>
> I also don't have much time.
>
> And as we both don't have much time and you don't have time even to keep
> the maintainer in the loop on Scripting function things, its better that
> someone with the time to trawl through messages, and commits, and C++ code,
> and spend hours with the Script debugger trying to spot new functions and
> properties and try to find things out that the C++ developers already know,
> do the job.
>
> It does to me however seem a waste of time to get things that way, when
> a courtesy email would sort things out very quickly efficiently and
> productively.
>
> And as you are indeed so busy and can not send such courtesy emails or
> discussion points to the person voluntarily maintaining the Scripting API,
> then it is better that some one who has the time to waste doing it the more
> difficult and harder way outlined above,  take the matter on.
>
> All I need is a an http:// to redirect enquiries to for the Scripting API
> please.
>
> Paul
>
>
> On 3 March 2012 01:13, Stefan Löffler <st.loeffler at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 2012-03-02 11:23, Paul A Norman wrote:
>> > I understand that to be a vote of no confidence.
>>
>> I hope you don't refer to my previous post, as I have very much
>> confidence in you and appreciate your work on the script API very much.
>>
>> I was under the impression that Henrik's code of the LaTeX log parser
>> script was the most up to date (IIRC, he also asked you to include a
>> link to it on your page), so after the numerous requests on the bug
>> tracker (and after discussing briefly with Henrik), I modified his
>> script to (hopefully) resolve some (if not all) of the problems with the
>> existing script.
>>
>> As far as the new script function is concerned: I committed it today in
>> the morning before leaving to work and had no time yet to send details
>> to you. However, it's not a particularly sophisticated function, and
>> most details can be found in the commit message of r961
>> (http://code.google.com/p/texworks/source/detail?r=961). It's a function
>> (TW.fileExists(path)) that checks if a certain path exists, and returns
>> the status (SUCCESS, FAILURE, PERMISSION_DENIED) similar to the status
>> returned by other file-related functions (such as readFile).
>> But the previous post was in fact meant as a notification that I
>> introduced that new function (which, IIRC, was asked for/proposed a
>> while back, anyway).
>>
>> So, I have no intention of excluding you from the development process of
>> Tw, I just have quite little time these days.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Stefan
>>
>
>
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