Re: open letter to pawel

[Pawel Salek <pawsa theochem kth se>]

On 2002.02.14 21:54 Ali Akcaagac wrote:
> 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 ?

Balsa is a community effort and I do not want to force my views on anybody 
else. The most important issues (IMO) to resolve in the nearest future are:
a. gnome-2 porting (there is some work on this about to be made available 
as a branch on CVS).

b. further improvements in filtering/searching.
c. disconnected IMAP if possible (this is a more long-term goal)

My vision of balsa is a light but reliable mail client.

> 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.

Anybody who has some experience with such community efforts as balsa will 
tell you that coordination is a very difficult part. There is for example 
no way of forcing different developers to do something because there are 
no means to do it: it's all voluntary work. I cannot obviously hire people 
to do certain things (unless we start  collecting donations, or something) 
and my personal time is limited, too. As everybody else's. I am very 
satisfied working with all the involved developers and I will be happy if 
things stay this way.

> 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.

Do not mistake balsa for what it is not. We do not have several developers 
working full time on the code (as evolution team has). I imagine that you 
know very well that best ideas are such that come with code implementing 
them.

> 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.

What do you think can we improve in our work on balsa in this respect?

> 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

Please stick to the fact. Jelmer work is great (Jelmer, thanks!) but the 
job to do is even greater and the code currently does not compile with 
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)

Would it help if I posted regularly a TODO list (I guess I could post one 
weekly)? Other suggestions?

-pawel

> 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.