Now Accepting GSoC 2016 Mentor Organization Applications

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 12:53:42PM +0000, JB2Cool wrote:
> On 9 February 2016 at 12:48, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > A possible project I could mentor in the summer would be a mobile
> > version of
> > > the planner (if nobody vetos it). That would be a separate app from
> > > subsurface-mobile but of course share a lot of code.

This is open source. No one can veto what you want to do.

> > > I would love this!  But why having it as a separate app?
> >
> > We only have a fighting chance to create an app that feels high-quality if
> > we
> > reduce complexity. Dirk has said it before, and I'm entirely behind this:
> > dive
> > planning is not a core feature for the foreseeable future. We need to limit
> > the featureset to the absolute necessary for quite a while.
> >
> > I'd much rather have something small, stable and high quality than a swiss
> > army knife that falls apart the moment you look at it.
> >
> > There are many areas in subsurface which need improvements, implementing a
> > dive planner is going to distract from making them work really well.

THIS. There is no way I'd side track Subsurface-mobile for this.
So yes, go ahead, build a Subsurface-planner app for mobile. Maybe at some
point that can be merged back. Or maybe it stays separate.

> So don't implement the dive planning into the subsurface-mobile just yet
> but does this really justify the creation of another companion app to
> perform the dive planning? That'll then be 3 mobile subsurface apps we
> have, surely better to restrict the number of them and eventually (Even if
> it's a while out) merge the functionality into a single app.


The companion app goes away. Subsurface-mobile replaces that (even though
that part of the functionality definitely needs a lot more testing). But
no, this would get us Subsurface-mobile and Subsurface-planner.

And while I would hate to see people spend time on the latter I can't stop
you. My guess is that Sebastian and I won't be contributing there, so
you'll be a bit on your own for now, but that's how it goes if you want to
do something that isn't really useful for the goals of the project (as
laid out by the humble maintainer).

Oh, and of course you can always fork the overall project and create your
own app that does whatever you want it to be. I would politely ask that
you change the name (how about Tubsurface to make clear that it's for Tec
divers?) in order to avoid confusion. But since we didn't trademark
Subsurface we can't force you to do that, either. Except through social
pressure, maybe :-)

/D