[wxPython-dev] 2.8.7.0 coming soon

[Rob McMullen]

On Nov 20, 2007 1:57 AM, Peter Damoc <pdamoc at gmail.com> wrote:
> IMHO, having a wheel and reinventing it to make it better is a GREAT THING!
> Having no good wheel or a broken  wheel and having 20 people perpetualy
> duplicating each others efforts is another thing.... not so great...

The "problem" with open source is there's no boss calling the shots,
no GvR with bdfl capacity calling meetings and directing the action.
There's just a bunch of disparate folks working mostly on our own.  We
all do this for fun, after all, and it's more fun to write code than
hash out over email the best way to do something.

Believe me, I enjoy contributing to others' projects.  If nothing
else, it saves you the headache of doing all the project management
stuff.  A year and a half ago if I had found a project that could do
multilple frames and multiple views of the same file, I would have
contributed to that.  But it felt wrong to me to fork someone else's
code with the intent to make major changes in the architecture because
it wouldn't support what I wanted.  Forkings always turn into ugly
affairs (see xfree86 vs x.org for a sorta-recent example).

I don't have a problem with different editors and don't see it as a
fracturing of the wxPython community.  I would enjoy it if we were
able to write more reusable components, however.

Related to peppy and Editra: as Cody pointed out, we're sharing some
code, and as he also pointed out our target audiences are somewhat
different.  For instance, Cody came up with a scheme to relate all of
the stc styles so that highlighting was consistent across the stc
lexers.  If you've looked at the scintilla source, you know that
scintilla just haphazardly assigned style values, so that comments in
one language have the same id as keywords in another, so Cody made a
wrapper on top of that to make it consistent.  Comments are always
styled the same regardless of language.  There's an example of not
reinventing the wheel -- I'll now never have to write that because
he's done a good job with it.  It frees me to focus on emacsy things
that won't be a part of Editra.

Rob