Re: houston, we have a problem- 2.10 showstoppers

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 12:31:24 -0500, Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 23:17 +0700, Ross Golder wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 10:43 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> > >122150       gnome-termnal 2.4.0.1 won't "redraw" text lines properly-
> > >redrawing is broken and has been for a long time. Given that vte is
> > >defacto unmaintained, and there is a patch that has been tested for a
> > >while now in gentoo, this just needs someone to commit and roll a new
> > >tarball.
> > >
> >
> > Perhaps you could give 'vte' a mention on gnome-love as a project
> > needing a maintainer? A terminal emulation widget sounds like a pretty
> > cool bit of software to work on to me. I love terminals and terminal
> > emulation. If I had enough time, I'd take it on myself. There's bound to
> > be other people out there that are into terminal emulators that are
> > willing to check in a few patches and roll the odd tarball every now and
> > then.
> >
> 
> Keep in mind that VTE could be a _lot_ worse.

Sure.

> It basically works and
> doesn't distract any of the OS vendors by making them _have_ to spend a
> lot of time on it right now. i.e. it doesn't have showstoppers. Lots of
> stuff that could be improved sure, but not showstoppers (other than
> perhaps the 1 that's on the list).

Off the top of my head:
* bad redraw problems, hopefully some of which will be fixed when this
patch goes in
* pretty bad performance problems, to the point where many developers
have moved back to xterm
* 22 unreviewed patches
* /78/ open non-enhancement bugs (many with duplicates), including 26
currently marked high priority

And of course the number of patches in the fedora vte package (Kjartan
told me the count was 23) tells me that at least some of the OS
vendors /are/ distracted by it.

> Just a bit of caution. I think it's easy to assume that every codebase
> needs to be "moving forward" and I'm saying there is a legitimate case
> for "maintenance mode" when other stuff is higher priority. As soon as
> you touch something, it becomes a bit of a timesink because you're
> creating new bugs and behaviors.

Oh, agreed completely. maintenance mode would be ideal- feature creep
is a big problem. Maintenance mode would, in vte's case, be a huge
upgrade- it has received no attention at all (other than frequent
curses) for quite some time.
 
Luis