cga2000 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote Wed, Jul 19, 2006: > On Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 05:31:42PM EDT, Reid Rivenburgh wrote: > > On Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 05:10:42PM -0400, cga2000 wrote: > > > Oh.. and as to developers being 'whimsical' relative to enhancements, I > > > think not.. That's exactly why I barged into your thread.. The list is > > > really the place where you can voice an opinion.. and since this caching > > > behavior was something that struck me as being fundamentally different > > > from the other browser.. Not sure it's a bad thing, though.. I briefly > > > mentioned it but Miciah has a good point.. when the server is > > > unresponsive it's OK I guess if you explicitly ask for a reload.. Maybe > > > less so when the reload is done on a transparent basis every time you > > > hit the back button (eg.). > > > > I guess "whims" was a bad word to use. > > so far they haven't objected...
We can take it and occationally use name-calling to refer to users (including ourself). ;) > > I just wanted to explain that I > > understand it's open source and that the developers can do what they like. > > I don't think they may.. or can. > > Whatever they may state in their disclaimers they just cannot pull the > plug on a piece of software that has some degree of following... > > And in fact they very rarely do so.. one of the nice things about OSS > is that when it happens someone else will step in.. if the software is > worth the effort.. that is.. (?) Optimally there should exist a kind of synergy where both parts thrive from each others effort. Some of the best times I've experienced has been where a user has taken on feeding me with input. Of course this requires that both parts are participating, and too often that is not the case. Over the years, ELinks development has been happening with some intense months followed by utter silence (from the developers). This probably doesn't inspire a lot of users to feedback their ideas and problems since you occationally hit a bad time where no developers have time to respond. This is why we have bugzilla. Add to this that the developers mostly hang out on IRC and communicate there, which might also not encourage users to participate when the dev team seems to "closely knit". A lot of this has to do with the fact that the ELinks project is probably a little odd and doesn't attract a lot of developers. While I've been part of the project there has been a core of the same 4-5 developers and often only a few of them being active at any one time. Add to this, that only a few developers are ready to invest the time it takes to do a major surgery of the code and ELinks development mostly ends up being minor improvements, cleanups, and optimizations. This is fine since ELinks, in my opinion, is mostly feature complete, but this also means that quite a few of the major TODOs have not been addressed. Thankfully, once in a while "an outsider" shows up and takes on doing a major overhaul in one area. > As to *being able* to do what they like.. it's pretty much the same > thing.. too much change that turns out to be unsatisfactory and the > user community will just not take it.. someone forks the project.. etc. I admit that I haven't been a good maintainer and am open to people wanting to help out making the ELinks releases more frequent, for example by making the maintainership be passed on after a year. Of course this requires that there exists a person who are willing to take on this obligation. Being only a handfull of more or less stable developers probably makes this harder. I know I haven't shown a lot of leadership, mostly because I don't believe in that. ELinks being a project based on peoples free time, it feels wrong to assume anything about anyone's, except my own time. However, as a maintainer, I could probably be better in pointing in a direction, for example I haven't made a roadmap. The biggest problem for me is that I want to devote more time to my studying, which I feel I have neglected in favour of working on ELinks. Also, I want to be able to participate in other OSS projects to get more experience. So I haven't done any serious ELinks hacking for the last year and a half. > I do hope someone will implement/improve CSS rendering some time soon, > though.. Not that I spend much time on commercial web sites.. but a > growing number are getting hard to read. We have been trying for 3 years now; trying to rewrite the HTML engine twice, supplementing the existing HTML engine with CSS capabilities. This is a bad track record, but I put my faith in Miciah reading up on the CSS specs and doing it right. ;) > Yeah.. that's how you eventually get them to pay attention.. > > .. moan consistently on the list with a bunch of other troublemakers > until they really get sick of it.. > > OK.. fixed in CVS - GIT, I mean.. > > now p*ss off.. > > :-) So you are saying that all developers are arrogant bastards? How can we not be when you use the word whimsical to describe our reaction to user requests. :) -- Jonas Fonseca _______________________________________________ elinks-users mailing list elinks-users@linuxfromscratch.org http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/elinks-users
