On Thursday 22 March 2007 14:51, robert engels wrote: > You already have a CVS repository. To create a branch is 1 command. > There is no difference for you (or anyone else) in performing any of > your work if you always commit against HEAD than what you are doing > today. It does allow others though to keep other versions alive more > easily. While this is true, creating a branch also means then maintaining this branch, managing separate documentation for the branch and also determining and managing the branch lifetime. That is definitely an additional overhead. For my part I am barely keeping up with the bug fixing / feature development, so mainting branches would definitely slow down the feature development process. It's certainly not a clear cut situation.
At the same time I am aware that users often would prefer a more stable situation (regardless of the library/project). I know I often would have. For the one really big change in the RTF section I have been providing a transition period of a bit more than 2 years (luckily most people seemed to switch immediately, or at least didn't complain about old bugs) and even though I had to do very little on the old RtfWriter, just providing support due to its existence takes time. > Maybe if you got down of your high-horse and were not so afraid of > allowing other people to contribute, iText would be even better than > it is today, and you would have to do less work (but maybe that is > what this is all about, some sort of veiled job security). If you look at the contributor list (which is floating around somewhere), it is clear that quite a few people have contributed over the years. Why the number of core developers has stayed the same over the years, I can only speculate upon. Perhaps it's personality conflicts, perhaps it's the fact that iText does most things pretty decently and people only contribute that little thing that they were missing, perhaps it's something else. I don't know. The project has grown enormously (both in users and capabilities) over the years, but it's still being run by two guys and that hanger-on (me). The project internal structures are geared at this and there simply has never been enough incentive to create a more formal process. I can fully understand where you are coming from, but most of our users are happy with the way things happen (or at least they're silent about it, if not). For the moment I guess we'll stick with being a bit unprofessional and making most of our users happy. Greetings, Mark P.S: Oh and any cleanup work in the RTF output section is _always_ appreciated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Buy the iText book: http://itext.ugent.be/itext-in-action/
