[PLEASE VOTE] so what should we be working on

[Lutz Vieweg]

On 05/28/2016 11:37 PM, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
> a) no one cares about Subsurface-mobile.

I personally don't care about subsurface-mobile, but I don't think
it's too relevant for non-commercial software development
"how many people care" - if one person cares and is
willing to invest effort into further development because
he cares, that's good enough to keep something going.

> b) Miika continues to deal with any import bug that shows up.
> Awesome. Your patches have been pushed

Indeed, it's great that this function, which to me is the most
essential of any dive log software, is updated from time to time.

> c) there continues to be a slow crawl of features, ideas, patches for
> the planner.

Slow? Actually, from my point of view, far more new ideas and
features are being suggested than required. Subsurface is mature -
even if it did not get new features for a year, it would still
be as good as today.

> d) no one cares about the dive site mess that we have. The current
> version in Subsurface 4.5.x is pretty much unusable and makes no
> bleeping sense.  No patches, some suggestions for improvement, no
> discussion, nothing.

The last person I remember to have spoken out clearly about this
annoying aspect (Linus) got chided a lot for doing so.

Indeed, Subsurface 3.x and 4.0 were better with regards to
the basic workflow "just enter locations for the dives
imported from your DC", and this is the one aspect that I
would like to see changed.

I don't need a fancy database of dive spots, but I would sure
like if I didn't have to click on 3 buttons just to have a confirmed
change of location of a dive.


> In summary, this project is pretty much dead. I guess it does
> everything the formerly active developers wanted?

Probably, and that's the opposite of "dead", it's "mature".

> (2) move things to maintenance mode

Yes, please. Just fix the annoying dive spot editing, it was
already fine once, when it was so much more simple.

If anyone comes up with "big new feature ideas", why not have
that developed as a fork until it's complete, even if this takes
many months, and only consider a merge to the master then?

> (3) focus on Subsurface-mobile

I think the mobile versions would be better off as projects of their own.

> (5) focus on Subsurface 5.0, write a completely new UI

Not again, please. I already felt that the UI transition from
3.x to 4.x didn't really bring substantial news, it got just different,
but not substantially better.


If someone wants to invest N days of work on some open source project,
adding fancy new features to Subsurface would not be the option I would
consider the best investment. There are other areas of need (think e.g.
about the lack of decent open source video conferencing MCUs or stable
calendar software) that are so much more in need of attention.
To me, that's a compliment for Subsurface.

Regards,

Lutz Vieweg