I have not had enough time recently for my maintainership of gtkmm, glibmm, libxml++ and libsigc++. And I’m unlikely to find time soon. Family and (income earning) work have taken priority. That’s why glibmm and gtkmm didn’t have .0 releases until a couple of weeks after the GNOME .0 release, and why there was no real attempt to follow the GNOME release schedule this time. I’ve hardly touched cairomm for years.
It’s not a lot of work but I’ve had to find a few days every few months to keep glibmm and gtkmm up to date with API additions in glib and GTK+, to keep roughly in sync with them. There has been rather a lot of new API recently. See the list of new API in gtkmm 3.6, glibmm 2.34 , gtkmm 3.4, and glibmm 2.32. Krzesimir’s ongoing attempt to use the introspection information (rather than .defs files) would help with this but not hugely because we’d still need to take care that the API is right for C++. Some initial .hg/ccg creator script would probably be most helpful.
I have no time for the more difficult bugs that turn up occasionally. Luckily Kjell Ahlstedt, José Alburquerque and others arrive regularly in bugzilla with great fixes for hard problems. I trust Kjell and José to commit directly, but they deserve some decent patch review. Unfortunately I often keep them waiting far too long.
I need to make some change. As a start, I might stop receiving bug email for glibmm and gtkmm, and stop worrying about adding new API. I guess it will take at least one missed GNOME release cycle for some other people to take over my responsibilities.
I wish you good luck and hope gtkmm finds great new maintainers. It turned really good for me when I stopped maintaining Sugar and PyGObject.
I’ve started some days ago learning Gtkmm. I like it, more than Swing at the moment. But this worries me. Couldn’t you ask Red Hat or Canonical to maintain it?
Peter: Maintainership is about individuals spending their free time on something because they are motivated to do so, not about companies making people work on something and getting paid for it. You are free to ask anybody and everybody to maintain it. Just do it. :)
Thanks. Sounds encouraging! I’m perfectly fine with anybody who does that on a dedicated base. Just thought, that a full time, paid maintainer would be a good idea. Some other blog posts in the last time noted, that their is now only one (?) full time developer on Gtk+ now?
You refer to a single blog post in July, and several people have disagreed with the points of view and the interpretation of the situation expressed in that specific posting.
Murray, I don’t think that leaving maintanership altogether is such a good idea. I’ve been doing some work on glibmm because recently I’ve had free time. However, I don’t guarentee that this will be so a lot longer. Soon I too will have other things to attend to in which case I wont have all that much time. This will especially be true if I can get some sort of local employment here where I live. I hope my contributions did not give you the wrong idea.
By the way, I’ve been working on some (rudimentary) vim scripts that process certain C documentation sections such as the C function declarations, including *_new() function declarations for generating constructors and create() methods, the properties section, and the virtual functions and signal declarations in the *Class declaration of GObject classes for wrapping signals and virtual functions.
They are not the best because they prompt about making changes and it’s not quite easy to know exactly what changes they want to make without being familiar with how they operate (I could document them to make it easier to know what they’re doing). The regular expressions matching certain things are also not very precise to exactly match the things the scripts try to change so sometimes the changes that the script prompts for have to be skipped. Other than that, they’ve help me to not have to do so much manually.
If you’d like, I can make the regular expressions a little more precise where I can, document what they do and get them over to you to see if they help any. Just let me know.