gPapers' future
Marcel Stimberg
as some of you might have already noticed, development on gPapers
started again after a year-long hiatus. Derek's priorities shifted
somewhat away from maintaining/development it, but I'm still very
interested in having gPapers live up to its promises so I started
working on it (and Derek was so kind to add me as a commiter to the
project). Currently, I'm mostly doing "behind the scenes" work that
should make development and maintenance easier in the future but does
not lead to any immediate user-visible changes (except for it no
longer failing to start, maybe ;) ). Among these changes are:
* Getting rid of outdated dependencies directly shipped with gPapers [DONE]
* Porting the GUI code to GTK3 and GtkBuilder [DONE]
* General refactoring to reduce code duplication [IN PROGRESS]
* Refactoring the import code to allow easier addition of new online
sources [MOSTLY DONE]
* Using distutils for packaging and making a "proper" release,
including a desktop file etc. [IN PROGRESS]
* Start making some small changes to the database layout and the GUI [TODO]
* Update the wiki page to contain proper instructions for installing
gPapers [TODO]
As soon as this is done (which is hopefully around the end of the month), I'll
do a formal release and invite everyone to test it. I'd advice against
using it "in production" right now, as stuff might break at all times.
Which leads me to a couple of questions to the prospective users out
there (there are still > 40 people subscribed to this list even though
there hasn't been any development for 3 years which leads me to think
there are quite a few people still interested!):
* What are you using / intending to use gPapers for: Scientific papers
(like Derek's original intention) or other kinds of documents?
* *Are* you actually using it currently? Would it be a major loss if
you could not use your existing database anymore because of changes in
the database layout?
* Do you / would you use the "ratings" feature (rate a paper and/or
rate an author) — or would you rather use tags, for example?
I have some more mid-term (replace some of the threading by
asynchronous IO, some GUI changes, more Importers, BibTeX export, ...)
and long-term (add unit tests, add documentation, add translations,
switch to tracker instead of using a database(?), ...) plans; to make
the development transparent and encourage other contributions I'm
going to extensively use the Issue tracker for keeping track of these.
I'd like to encourage anybody who has ideas, feature requests (or bug
reports, of course) to use the issue tracker as well. Oh, and by the
way: Derek switched the code repository from subversion to mercurial,
you can therefore now easily clone your own branch if you want to
develop any features (although I'd suggest to wait until the release).
One more thing: I'm currently developing gPapers on Ubuntu 12.04,
therefore it might well not work on other/older Linuxes (and most
likely it will not work at all onWindows...). After the release I'm of
course willing to make
changes if they are necessary for other platforms.
That's it for now, thanks for your attention :)
Comments/ideas/suggestions welcome,
Marcel