UI issues

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 06:36:35PM +0100, Davide DB wrote:
> As user I filed a couple of enhancement requestes on planner UI for small
> improvements.
> Maybe when the CCR part will be implemented would be nice correcting them

The biggest problem is how few people are working on the UI.

Let me qualify that. When we switched from Gtk to Qt quite a while ago one
of the main reasons was that we had zero experienced Gtk people and
several people who showed interest in working on the UI if only it was
written in Qt.

What happened then was odd. We gained Tomaz as a new developer. Tomaz is a
one man army who has created an incredible amount of code and he is BY FAR
the biggest contributor to the UI.

I have certainly written quite a bit of Qt code since.

Other people who hadn't written UI code before have added code.

Two of the people who stated they would work on a Qt UI (and who had
existing Qt development experience) have completely disappeared from
Subsurface :-(

So overall more people are sending patches for the UI, but still, we don't
have as many people as I had hoped just "working ON the UI" and making it
better.  Which, frankly, is ridiculously easy with Qt.
And if you add code that sucks, Tomaz usually gets annoyed and fixes it.

So yes. We need someone to take "ownership" of the planner UI. Robert is
doing an excellent job with the logic and especially the math and physics
behind the scene - but I don't think he'll be insulted if I say that UI
maybe isn't his biggest strength. :-)  And he's already stretched thin
finding enough time to work on the parts of the code that he owns.

And while I will randomly change things as they annoy me (see this current
thread), my overall time budget is spread out across so many tasks, it's
not even funny.

/D