[devel] Why agnubis did not succeed (BEWARE: just personal opinions)

[Sven Herzberg]

Heya,

  as nadav asked me in IRC to explain why agnubis failed I'm going to
explain what I know about it and why I think that agnubis isn't worth to
be used as a codebase. (So just another warning: this is all just
personal opinions, you won't find many objective reasons here)

1. coding time
==============
  Agnubis was coded last summer, when I was finishing school, that meant
that I didn't have much homework and lots of time (as I'm no great fan
of sitting around and reading schoolbooks to learn). So I had lots of
time to code and implement agnubis' user interface. Now I'm currently
studying, having time again, but until december I had lots of different
things im my mind (studying, moving to hamburg, ...).
  I don't know why the other guys stopped coding, but AFAIK luisma had
changed his employer and was quite heavily involved there.

2. diacanvas
============
  Once we »finished« the load/show stuff. We wanted to implement
animations (at least I wanted to), but when I had a closer look on the
diacanvas we were using for all the view/edit/show stuff I realized that
I was not very friendly when it comes to animation.
  So I didn't want to go on with diacanvas, where luisma and tero
wanted, so at least I didn't get the changes I wanted.

3. gdome2
=========
  Tero made a nice job integrating the gdome stuff into agnubis to get a
file reading (and AFAIK later something almost working for writing) and
presentation-in-memory-stuff working. It is a very big piece of code and
I think that Tero is the only agnubis hacker who knows how that piece of
code really works.

4. gal
======
  I copied some stuff from gnumeric and used gal to have a font-selector
in the toolbar. I think that I was the only one from the agnubis team
who knew how this was implemented.

5. gob
======
  gob is ice to make the gobject stuff easier, but one year ago it was
not very reliable (it crashed at every type-check for one of my
gob-objects), and it became really horrible to debug the gob-created
code.

Regards,
  Sven

-- 
Sven Herzberg <address@hidden> · Jabber: address@hidden
Webmaster von GNOME Deutschland    · http://www.gnome-de.org/