Re: Future of gnome-pilot?

["David A. Desrosiers" <david a desrosiers gmail com>]

On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 19:00 +0200, Gerhard wrote:
> Thanks for your quick response. It's great to hear that it's going on.
> Unfortunately I'm not a coder so I can't help as a volunteer. But I
> really appreciate your work. 

That's part of the problem... lots of patrons in the restaurant, but not
enough cooks in the kitchen. 

I've spent a great deal of time trying to recruit people to help with
the pilot-link project (which gnome-pilot, KPilot and J-Pilot all use
extensively) not only to develop, but to simply test the code that has
been written over the last 6-8 years. There have been drifters who have
come, made their contributions and then vanished... others have stayed
for a few years, but they too dwindled out. 

Many of us have very busy lives that include supporting families, busy
day jobs and hobbies that don't include writing, debugging and
publishing OSS software for the community. Trying to carve out 4-5 hours
a week to write, test and debug is not always so easy. 

It's great that people want new features, but it's not so easy to just
implement them in a weekend... especially when developing against PalmOS
is almost entirely a black-box, reverse-engineering effort. 

Not only that, but the applications themselves are _device_ dependent,
even across the same major version of the OS (the Photos and Contacts
application are two perfect examples, completely different on OS5 and
even different across Sony vs. Palm vs. Treo devices).

What we need most are more developers who know how to code, and have an
in-depth understanding of the code itself (or can grasp it and ramp up
quickly). There are a lot of patches that have been thrown over the wall
over the years, which fix "tactical" problems, but break the "strategic"
paradigm that these various projects are heading.

Hopefully that helps understand some of the problems we're facing with
the delivery of new features and bug fixes. These projects aren't dead,
they're just stretched so thin sometimes, it's hard to see their
movement.