Re: SourceNav release ...

[Ralf Corsepius <corsepiu@faw.uni-ulm.de>]

Am Son, 2002-01-06 um 04.54 schrieb Mo DeJong:
> On Sun, 6 Jan 2002 02:25:59 -0600 
> "Simonovsky, Pavel" <Pavel_Simonovsky@bmc.com> wrote:
> 
> > 		So - you mean , that in fact SN is dead , and there is no
> > any development team behind it? It is very important info - I suggested this
> > tool to 2-3 teems in our company ... I have to warn them - that it dose no
> > worth a waste of time...
> 
> Well, that might be a bit too strong. I don't speak for Red Hat, but as a former member of the development team I feel safe in stating that they are no longer allocating resources to SN. Basically, it comes down to $$. If you have paying customers then you can pay the engineers and managers. This might just be my impression, but it seemed that being able to download the code for free gave people the impression that they should not have to chip in for any new development. Also, the dot crunch did not help.
> 
> I know for a fact that Ian has been doing some great work on his own
time to get the development version that uses Tcl/Tk 8.3 available via
CVS. It is quite an improvement over the 5.0 release. That said, what is
lacking is time and resources to put out a 5.1 release. What is the
solution? I am not sure. I would like to hear ideas from people on this
list.

OK, here is mine:

IMHO, the basic problem is to render SN into an active project.

As RH apparently is not developing actively anymore, one solution would
be to convert SN into a real OpenSource community project.

AFAIS, there would be 2 approaches to such an attempt:

1.) Apply the existing RH-infrastructure and run it
RH-conducted/assisted. 
This would require RH to provide minimal assistance and support (ML,
CVS, ftp etc) + generally OK-ing into such undertaking.

Given the existing SN-related infrastructure at RH, I fail to see why
this should not work. At that lacks are active maintainers (RH or Non-RH
person) willing to accept and apply patches + to guide people though
development.

From my POV, it's only the lack of active maintainers which currently
lets appear SN as "dumped dead code junk".

2.) To lunch a GPL'ed non-RH related project somewhere else, using RH's
SN-code as basis. IMHO, nobody actually would be interested in doing so
and I also doubt it would actually work out.

> I would think the right solution would provide a stable 5.1 release,
> but also provide a plan for 5.2 and future releases.
I fully agree.

But the only way to achieve something of this kind IMHO would be
somebody (the maintainer - who is it? Ian, you?) to show some visible
initiative - Currently, SN appears not only to be dead, but to
unmaintained.

Ralf