future of BlueGriffon development; wanting to be supportive

[Garret Wilson]

I'd like to get an idea of whether there are now plans (and resources) to actively continue developing BlueGriffon. It languished for a long time. I was (and am) overjoyed with the recent release of 1.8, but there remain many serious bugs that have not been addressed for years.

When I last checked in on this group a few years ago, I complained a lot and probably came across as combative and/or argumentative. But I want to assure you that I really want to support BlueGriffon. There is nothing out there like it; nothing comes close to giving clean XHTML5 output, and it is a real shame that BlueGriffon has a few remaining serious bugs. I'd like to help, but I'd also like to hear from Daniel on whether BlueGriffon is really going forward, or if 1.8 is just a last gasp before it dies.

For example Bug 628 has been open for almost two years. BlueGriffon corrupts line endings (with invalid sequences), screwing up standard Git workflows.

There are numerous other bugs such as the fact that keyboard remappings don't stick at first. Then there are the wider usability issues of the default keyboard mappings not matching anything that people are used to from other applications, requiring retraining of users on how to use these non-standard settings or how to remap the keys.

As I mentioned and want to stress: I am hugely supportive of BlueGriffon, and I want to ensure that in no way does it die. But it seriously needs some tune-ups. How can I help? Do I need to become a developer on the project? Would my providing some financial support somewhere be helpful? Does someone need to fork the project?

Daniel, please let us know the state of the project, and if 1.8 really signals the re-energizing of serious development work. How best can people like me help make sure that BlueGriffon goes forward and doesn't stall again?

Sincerely,

Garret Wilson
President
GlobalMentor, Inc.

[Daniel Glazman]

On 15/11/2015 18:11, Garret Wilson wrote:

> I'd like to get an idea of whether there are now plans (and resources)
> to actively continue developing BlueGriffon. It languished for a long
> time. I was (and am) overjoyed with the recent release of 1.8, but there
> remain many serious bugs that have not been addressed for years.

Hi Garrett.

> When I last checked in on this group a few years ago, I complained a lot
> and probably came across as combative and/or argumentative. But I want
> to assure you that I really want to support BlueGriffon. There is
> nothing out there like it; nothing comes close to giving clean XHTML5
> output, and it is a real shame that BlueGriffon has a few remaining
> serious bugs. I'd like to help, but I'd also like to hear from Daniel on
> whether BlueGriffon is really going forward, or if 1.8 is just a last
> gasp before it dies.

It's not. But please read below.

>
> For example Bug 628
> <http://bugzilla.bluegriffon.org/show_bug.cgi?id=628> has been open for

> almost two years. BlueGriffon corrupts line endings (with invalid
> sequences), screwing up standard Git workflows.

This is not a bug in BlueGriffon itself. This is a bug in Gecko, the
rendering engine BlueGriffon uses. And I agree it's a very serious one
that is extremely complicated to fix.

> There are numerous other bugs such as the fact that keyboard remappings
> don't stick at first. Then there are the wider usability issues of the
> default keyboard mappings not matching anything that people are used to
> from other applications, requiring retraining of users on how to use
> these non-standard settings or how to remap the keys.
>
> As I mentioned and want to stress: I am hugely supportive of
> BlueGriffon, and I want to ensure that in no way does it die. But it
> seriously needs some tune-ups. How can I help? Do I need to become a
> developer on the project? Would my providing some financial support
> somewhere be helpful? Does someone need to fork the project?
>
> Daniel, please let us know the state of the project, and if 1.8 really
> signals the re-energizing of serious development work. How best can
> people like me help make sure that BlueGriffon goes forward and doesn't
> stall again?

Let me summarize:

1. yes, BlueGriffon is still actively maintained.
2. there are areas for concerns for its future but these are
unfortunately not in my hands at all. Mozilla is on a path to
deprecate and get rid of XUL, its XML UI language BlueGriffon is
based on. Their plan is certainly to move to html-based UI with
WebComponents. Unfortunately, this will have a tremendous,
potentially lethal, impact on most XULRunner-based applications
including their own Thunderbird and of course BlueGriffon.
3. understanding what is the current focus of Mozilla has always been
extremely complicated for embedders like us because Mozilla does not,
I repeat does NOT, give us any extra information or roadmap. In
short, we learn decisions like the XUL add-ons' deprecation just like
anyone else, i.e. when a post about it is released on a Mozilla blog.
We don't get extra help or discussion about our own products and
ecosystem, we don't get extra information about a migration plan
towards html-based UI. We're left in limbos, as if Mozilla did not
care at all, I repeat at all, about its ecosystem.
4. I will use XUL as long as I can to maintain BlueGriffon. It is
unfortunately harder to dive into Gecko's guts at this time just
because of time commitments. And to be honest, I'm not sure I am in
the best mood about a project that cares so little about its
ecosystem these days.
5. BlueGriffon remains well alive with a vibrant users community around
it. But I'm almost alone maintaining it and the revenue stream I get
from it is not enough. So I need extra revenue streams that take me
a lot of time.

I don't really know what else to say.

</Daniel>

[ima...@cruzio.com]

[...]

Perhaps you can throw your lot in with the Pale Moon programmers, who have
been re-worked the Firefox browser ever since Australis. They are working
on a revised rendering engine to circumvent the killing of XUL. I am not
a programmer, so I have no idea how difficult it would be to do this, but
I am quite happy with Pale Moon on my PC machines.

Thank you for all your hard work.

--John

[Garret Wilson]

On Monday, November 16, 2015 at 6:43:49 AM UTC-2, Daniel Glazman wrote:

...

>
> For example Bug 628
> <http://bugzilla.bluegriffon.org/show_bug.cgi?id=628> has been open for
> almost two years. BlueGriffon corrupts line endings (with invalid
> sequences), screwing up standard Git workflows.

This is not a bug in BlueGriffon itself. This is a bug in Gecko, the
rendering engine BlueGriffon uses. And I agree it's a very serious one
that is extremely complicated to fix.

Daniel, this is really useful information. Could you perhaps add that information to Bug 628 itself? Otherwise this helpful information will get lost and will not be usable by anyone trying to address that bug.

In fact I have assigned one of my developers to look into it. I would like for you, him, and I to discuss this further on Bug 628, but brought up the subject here in the group because no one ever seems to reply to the bug reports. :(

For example, he and I wanted to discuss whether something like the Tools > Markup cleaner could be leveraged. Do you mind if we have that discussion in the bug comments, or do you prefer to discuss these things only in this group? Again I would prefer to discuss them in the bug comments, but I have a fear that I will be talking to myself...