Future of NEdit?

[Thorsten Haude]

Hi,

* nedit at irotas.net wrote (2007-11-24 18:02):
>So, what is the future of NEdit? Are there any forks out there that are
>continuing to evolve the project? Is it dead?

I'm the guy letting the release slip; sorry for that. I picked it up
again in the last days; the most serious bug looks already half-solved.


Anyway, here are my thoughts about NEdit's current status. I think
NEdit's problems can be put into three different categories. (Any
similarities to the Roadmap are entirely unconincidental.)

1. NEdit

    - Missing Unicode Support

This just has to work. NEdit will not be taken seriously until it
arrives in the 21st century. We can also expect a number of crashes
through inter-client communication (aka PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD).


    - Horrible Settings System

In theory, every setting should be available through the GUI. In
praxis, you have very important setting only available through a text
file with obscure syntax and funny semantics.


    - Limited Macro Language

Hooks are my personal favorites, but there should be some deeper
changes. For example, why are macros bound to a window?


    - Lazy Developers vs. Roadmap

We never even talked about it. Maybe it doesn't work out, because
people here are volunteers, and there will be some important, boring
jobs. The non-status now will not help however.


    - Too Many Binaries

Every new user I've ever witnessed uses nedit, nobody uses nc. The
problem with that is that the interface currently in nedit is almost
completely dispensable, while nc's is essential.


2. Toolkit

In general, I think NEdit can get quite a number of healthy years out
of motif. It's very stable on legacy Unix, and I guess it can be very
stable on Linux.

This is also the area where we can do least, short of taking over
Lesstif completely.


    - Slow to nonexisting Bugfixing

The Fedora guys says he's "sitting on a pile of patches fixing many
lesstif issues", but the project is on extended leave. OTOH, in our
tracker are open Open Motif bugs from 2001.


    - Horrible Legal Status

Motif's and OM's licenses are just nuisances. NEdit is not pure GPLed
because of them, and that will damage us whenever find a simple GPLed
solution to one of our problems.


    - Very low Penetration in some Markets

NEdit and other old-school applications really lost market share
against KDE and Gnome tools. This allows it modern apps like e.g.
Klipper to play games with NEdit and just don't care about it.


3. World

    - 32 vs. 64 bits

This doesn't look like it would be terribly difficult to handle, but
it must be done, and it can't wait, so resources are missing elsewhere.


    - Death of Xfree86

At least one big bug is brought on by X.org, there will probably be
more. If something new comes up, that's another thing that just cannot
be postponed, X.org is too important.


    - Sloppy Linux Distributors

A few years back, Red Hat shipped with some versions of Lesstif we
considered to be broken. Now Ubuntu's NEdit has problems although it
runs on a motif considered to be one of the stablest.

On the other hand, at least Red Hat's packer spend considerable effort
working on their NEdit; I'm sure other distributions are similar.

I think we need to get back to these guys, to see what they expect
from us, how we can make things easier for them, and to tell them how
to work with NEdit and how to help us. I guess a quicker release cycle
would help help them, so we should get one. In any case, these people
need to be on our mailing lists.


Thorsten                                          Kristin Hersh: Your Ghost
-- 
Property is the creature of the law, and the law which creates property can
be defended only on this ground, that it is a law beneficial to mankind.
    - Thomas Babington Macaulay
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