Re: Cairo as common graphics context

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 17 Mar 2006, at 00:21, Alex Perez wrote:

> Fred Kiefer wrote:
> > ...It looks like I am
> > currently the only GNUstep developer working on back and the  
> > interaction
> > between back and gui and also specifically on the cairo backend.
>
> Were you not aware of this prior to this exchange of e-mails?

Yes he was.  I can say that with confidence for two reasons ...
1. Everyone who tracks the developer mailing list and/or the  
ChangeLogs is bound to be pretty much aware of what's going on.
2. I heard him mention the fact at FOSDEM.

> From your "looks as if" statement, it sounds as if you were not.

Maybe ... but, you can easily see that as a turn of phrase typical of  
programmer ... taking caution to avoid saying something he can't  
actually prove.

> This is frankly part of the problem. Nobody knows who has the  
> football, who is in charge, who is working on what, etc etc.

From the project management point of view, I don't think so ...  
developers all (meaning anyone reading the mailing lists and tracking  
ChangeLogs) have a good idea of what's going on (or not going on).   
It's true that newcomers and people who don't track things need to  
ask in order to find out what's happening, but I'm not convinced that  
that constitutes a problem.

It would be really good to have nice up to date summary on the  
website/wiki for end users of course, but is it worth diverting the  
effort of the few coders we have to maintaining that?  I think not.   
It's hard enough to write decent messages for ChangeLogs and svn  
commits as most coders (I include myself here) are not great at  
communications :-(

> Adam is not willing to ask anyone (either because there's nobody to  
> ask or because he simply doesn't feel that he should have to  
> delegate/ask anyone else to code anything) and so the problem will  
> continue to the end of time unless something changes.

Agreed, but I think much more the former than the latter.  We need  
new coders for the core libraries desperately, and more people to  
manage the organisation/communications (website/wiki/publicity).