Re: houston, we have a problem- 2.10 showstoppers

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 23:17 +0700, Ross Golder wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 10:43 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> >122150 	gnome-termnal 2.4.0.1 won't "redraw" text lines properly-
> >redrawing is broken and has been for a long time. Given that vte is
> >defacto unmaintained, and there is a patch that has been tested for a
> >while now in gentoo, this just needs someone to commit and roll a new
> >tarball.
> >
> 
> Perhaps you could give 'vte' a mention on gnome-love as a project
> needing a maintainer? A terminal emulation widget sounds like a pretty
> cool bit of software to work on to me. I love terminals and terminal
> emulation. If I had enough time, I'd take it on myself. There's bound to
> be other people out there that are into terminal emulators that are
> willing to check in a few patches and roll the odd tarball every now and
> then.
> 

Keep in mind that VTE could be a _lot_ worse. It basically works and
doesn't distract any of the OS vendors by making them _have_ to spend a
lot of time on it right now. i.e. it doesn't have showstoppers. Lots of
stuff that could be improved sure, but not showstoppers (other than
perhaps the 1 that's on the list).

So any J Random Enthusiastic Person may not be a plus. Getting some
basic patch review on the patches that really matter, we should
definitely support someone who wanted to do that. But it's really easy
to take a terminal codebase off into the land of incredibly bad ideas if
you don't know what you're doing.

Just a bit of caution. I think it's easy to assume that every codebase
needs to be "moving forward" and I'm saying there is a legitimate case
for "maintenance mode" when other stuff is higher priority. As soon as
you touch something, it becomes a bit of a timesink because you're
creating new bugs and behaviors.

Of course, if we do get J Random Enthusiastic and they do screw up we
can always ship an old release tag of VTE, so I guess there's no genuine
danger other than hurt feelings.

Havoc