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

[Jonathan Kew]

Paul,

I'm sorry to have to write this, as your intentions are no doubt good and laudable, but .... I think you are out of line. Seriously.

Sure, texworks development is nowhere near as rapid or thorough as we'd all wish, but I think your complaints and criticisms are misplaced and unjustified. My "absenteeism", while it means I'm not contributing fresh code at this point, is not (as far as I'm aware) hampering those - Stefan, Charlie - who are currently working on development. If they're being blocked somehow by the fact that I'm listed as the project "owner", I hope they'll approach me about the issues and we can resolve them.

Your recent rants - and your apparent offence at not receiving a personal email when a feature was added - are inappropriate and unhelpful; Stefan, in particular, does not deserve to be faced with all this when he's been doing such a great and dedicated job as the primary developer for a long time now.

Aside from that, you can throw all the "governance" in the world at a project, but that's not going to get any code written. Unless someone with far deeper pockets than TUG decides to take on sponsorship of the project and finance a full-time development team - in which case yes, some kind of management structure would also be needed - the main constraint will remain the availability of "spare" time for the few programmers actually capable, interested and motivated to write code. Back when I was self-employed, it was possible for me - thanks to TUG's support, and UK-TUG's assistance with equipment - to devote substantial chunks of time to the initial creation of TW, and this got the project off the ground quite rapidly. But AFAIK, none of us are currently in a position to do that, and I don't believe TUG is in a position to hire full-time, long-term software development staff to take it on. So it evolves more slowly, as and when the contributors are able. Smothering them with governance models is not going to help; if anything, it'll suffocate whatever life the project has.

Regards,

Jonathan


On 5 Mar 2012, at 01:29, Paul A Norman wrote:

> 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
> 
>