[wxPython-dev] 2.8.7.0 coming soon

[Kevin Ollivier]

Hi Rob,

On Nov 20, 2007, at 9:22 AM, Rob McMullen wrote:

> 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.

That too, though, must come from the community. And herein lies the  
rub, as they say. Everyone wants to have reusable components, that are  
general purpose and have their bugs ironed out, but not many people  
want to invest the time into creating such components because it  
(apparently) isn't very fun and isn't really a one-person effort,  
unless that person has a wealth of experience. So how will wxPython  
get all these things it sorely needs?

To be honest, over the past couple years I've learned to more actively  
engage the community (and offer my help as well) because I learn so  
many things through discussions and the experiences of others that I  
could never have learned simply through trial and error, and I also  
want to pass what I can on to new users coming in as a way of  
returning the favor. As a result, I can definitely say that my coding  
ability has greatly improved, and I'm much more satisfied with the  
code I write these days. (And by satisfied, I mean I honestly feel I  
write less bugs thanks to better understanding of MVC, etc. and I  
catch more of the bugs I do write quicker thanks to automated testing  
and TDD approaches picked up from looking at others' coding practices  
and discussing with others.)

So I don't know, while I can see the argument that it might be more  
fun to hack on something by yourself, I personally find it a hundred  
times more fun and satisfying to work together with a devoted  
community of users to build shared solutions that we can all benefit  
from, and watch the community as a whole improve, even if it means me  
going the extra mile and doing the tedious stuff. I think that is the  
true essence of open source (not just "getting the code out there"),  
in fact.

Regards,

Kevin

>
> 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
>
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