Re: [gedit-list] Thoughts on being paid to work on the gedit stack

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

Hi Sébastien,

     first of all let me apologize for my lack of feedback on your work. The usual list of excuses applies (work, travel, life, etc), but the bottom line is that if I will not find more time for proper review and feedback I'll pass on my maintainer duties and give you more freedom to go ahead with changes.

However you also started off by citing Philip's blog post and honestly I found that post wrong and disturbing, especially since it mentions some of the projects we work on and that over the last years, had many great contributions both from the OPW and GSOC programs.

What is true is that a renewed effort to work on developer tools and on the gedit stack in particular would be great.

See below, for more detailed responses to some of your questions

On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 6:06 PM, Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org> wrote:

I'm working on one of them, but it currently lacks a review:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354587

I'll try to have a look at it though probably in my review list this comes after the filesaving patch work

 

One of my dream is to be paid to work on free software. I haven't
applied yet to the companies working on GNOME, as my English is not good
enough (understanding someone on the phone is really difficult, for
example).

I understand your feelings, and I really hope you'll find a good opportunity. For what is worth I can certainly vouch for you.

So another solution is to launch a fundraising campaign, like
Pitivi. Or it can be a fundraising campaign like for the accessibility
and security launched by the GNOME Foundation, with a call for bid after
that (even if I'm not taken, it would benefit to the GNOME developer
experience).

I am not sure about this, crowdfunding is a lot more work than it seems and to be successful it needs to target a large group of interest and propose something compelling, concrete and well defined. I am surely open to pursue this idea, but I am not sure that a generic "let's improve the developer tools" campaign would raise a lot of funding and even if it did it would be difficult to define how to use them.

Another thing, since I'm the only developer of latexila, I'm more
productive. The review process is a bottleneck for GtkSourceView,
GtkTextView, gedit. Of course reviews are better for the quality of the
code and APIs produced. But I'm a bit discouraged by the time that it
sometimes takes to get a review. I understand that you don't have a lot
of time, you have a full-time job, etc. But it would be a pity, there is
a possibility to improve significantly the gedit stack. I'm a bit
worried about this bottleneck, all I want is to improve our software.
Maybe we should find another model of development. I already push some
commits without reviews, if it doesn't touch the API and is trivial
enough. In this case a post-review is obsiously preferable, if you have
the time.  But when it touches the API, having at least one other
opinion is necessary I think.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post I can only apologize about the lack of timely feedback. I do not have a magic solution to this: I'll try to do better at review and/or give you more space about pushing things forward.

 

What do you think? Are there other developers interested to be paid to
work on the GNOME text editor stack, nacho, Jesse, pbor, ...? If I'm the
only one interested, and if it works, what to do about the reviews?

Making a living by working on something you are passionate about sounds great, however I am fortunate enough to have a job I like and enjoy and I think there are very good sides about the fact that such job is not directly related to gnome: among other things it forces me to learn different things and face different challenges and at the same time it ensures that working on gedit and gnome remains something I can fully enjoy without the stress and pressure of deadlines, customers, features requested by the sales department etc ;-)

Ciao

    Paolo

 

--
Sébastien
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