Re: open letter to pawel

[Emmanuel <e allaud wanadoo fr>]

On 14.02.2002 21:54 Ali Akcaagac wrote:
> hello pawel,
> 
> how do you think the future of balsa should look ? i am asking this
> because there is no reply on some stuff that i posted on the mailinglist
> for discussion. how and what way should balsa continue and how do you
> see the future ?
> 
> i understand that you do this project for a couple of years now and you
> do quite a good job but personally i think the development of balsa is
> quite slow and a bit uncoordinated. please dont get me wrong, i remember
> a couple of time back the plans on getting balsa on gnome 2 but really
> nothing much happened till yet.
> 
> i almost lost interest in doing some lines for balsa since i dont see
> much progress. the only really active ones are always the same people.
> but we dont get any progress. the version numbers increase, a lot of
> bugs will be moved from one version to another, new bugs are getting in,
> the code looks like a dutch cheese. gnome 2 is nocking on the door a lot
> of projects like evolution and sylpheed are starting to become better
> than balsa. i often came up with comments hints and ideas about how we
> could improve and change but often these mails are beeing unanswered.
> 
> is there any roadmap, any interest any motivation to get balsa port to
> gnome 2 or at least bail out a lot of problems on current versions ? or
> is there a need that we need to fork balsa and go our own way ?
> 
> look i am active watching the progress of gnome 2 and how much stuff
> people do to get things working, even the claimed dead nautilus gets
> progress, fast changes etc. by the same free programming developers. a
> lot of code cleanups, a lot of progress, a lot of speedups etc.
> 
> i see that there are some changes in balsa code every now and then but
> mainly changes, tweaks additions but no CODEFREEZE or no fullstop where
> one can say. well until here and end, now lets go a new road. nothing
> that comes from you (somehow we all expect you to say something, since
> you are the maintainer of balsa) but nothing. actually no one really
> knows what the plans are and what to do.
> 
> look jelmer did some more or less tweaks to get balsa running on gnome 2
> but thats all and for sure not enough. there are a lot of people on this
> list including me and some others that really BURN to get things worked
> up. i think with a tad more project organisation etc we could get balsa
> back to #1 (no its for sure not THE gnome mailclient no more)
> 
> well, i am not the perfect programmer but i think we all together could
> manage it. seriously i hope you gonna answer me and i also hope that the
> others write one or 2 lines for this too otherwise it makes no sense for
> me staying on this mailinglist or contribute more stuff to balsa. well i
> would also take a reply from you where you say that i should completely
> piss off or something. it would disappoint me but life will continue.
> 
> oki whats up now ? all comments replies welcome. even those telling me
> to fuck off..
> 

	Hi Ali,
No I won't tell you to fuck off ;-)
Even if I think you take it a bit too with your heart, I appreciate your 
sincerity and your commitment to make things change.
Anyway here is my main thought about this : we should take time to migrate 
to gnome 2 to clean the code (I mean trim out all the tweaks that were 
added on and on again to the original code) to have a good basis for at 
least 2 years, that should make it clearer for future developpers, 
certainly speedier, and we should be able to track down the damn weird 
bugs hidden there since too long.
Indeed the port is THE good oportunity to look at pretty much all the 
code, and to understand what it does and rewrite it the good way.
Look at what happened to address-entry (even if it's not a central piece 
of code for Balsa) : Peter and I have cut a BUNCH of code and now the code 
is certainly clearer, much more understandable, even speedier, less bugs...
Now it can be ported more easily. I'm not saying we must do that for all 
code. Indeed we can just understand what the code is supposed to do and 
rewrite it clearer, cleaner and speedier directly in the gnome 2 
framework. That would allow a faster port, but we'll also loose the 
ability to clean the 1.2.x branch code that is the nowadays stable branch.
There is a choice to make here : either we focus on fast gnome 2 port, or 
either we take more time and benefit of the port effort to also improve 
the 1.2.x branch.
Note that this effort will certainly take pretty much all of our time and 
that new features will certainly be almost stalled for a while. IMHO it's 
OK because Balsa is yet almost full-featured for normal use (with the big 
exception of pgp support).
I think Pawel should have the last word on that, but we're all involved 
and we should not wait him to think alone about these issues. So this 
thread should grow up of all our contribution to build the future of 
Balsa, still IMHO.
And I thank Ali to bring these concerns to our attention (even with his 
not too diplomatic style ;-)
Bye
Manu