F-Spot renaissance



Hey,

recently I found Rubens old project tripod on github [1] and had a look
on it. Unfortunately I wasn't able to build it so far, so I cannot try
it.

However, while looking at the code I got the feeling that we may be
wrong in trying to update the old F-Spot codebase and should think about
starting from scratch.

F-Spot is a big monolythic package of code which makes it very difficult
to maintain and add new features. Furthermore it scares people which
doesn't help to attract new developers and so slows down the overall
development activity.

Furthermore when trying to clean something up you have to try not to
break anything which makes the work much more difficult. Examples:

 - Tim removal of libfspot which resulted in a really big commit
 - the ongoing work to use code from Hyena or the switch from libglade
to gtkbuilder


This all wastes time that we could use to develop new shiny features and
improve usability. Because of this it would make much sense to reboot
development on a new codebase from my point of view. This would give
many advantages like:

- the possibility to reuse a lot of stuff which has already been used
and tested widely (means Hyena and other Banshee stuff: database access,
service based architecture...)

- Build a solid, expandable and extension-based framework which makes it
easier to develop new features and reduces time to step into the code.

- Rethink some old ideas on the work-flow and user interface. We could
get help by the gnome interface designers who do their jobs very well.


It's sure that a restart like this would throw the project back in time
a bit, but I'm sure that it would pay off in the future.

I'm really interested to hear your opinions on this.

with best regards,
Paul


[1] https://github.com/rubenv/tripod

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