[PLEASE VOTE] so what should we be working on

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi Dirk,

On 28.05.2016 23:37, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
> I have been focused on other things for a while (and the why and the what will become public fairly soon) and decided to use that chance to figure out what would happen if I just stopped paying attention here for a while.
>
> Here's what I think I learned (correct me if I'm wrong)
>
> a) no one cares about Subsurface-mobile. No bug reports, no code, no suggestions, nothing. So I guess we should call this a failed attempt and abandon it - screw the 500 or so people who use it.
I understand that being the only one within the Subsurface community who 
actually does feature development on Subsurface-mobile must be frustrating, but 
I think the other replies in this thread show pretty clearly that it's not like 
"no one cares about Subsurface-mobile".

I was actually surprised by your conclusion, because at least the discussion 
about creating a C.H.I.P.-based device for syncing dive computers with 
smartphones running Subsurface-mobile got a lot of contributions and seemed to 
get quite a few people pretty excited!

> (3) focus on Subsurface-mobile, release the iOS version, update the Android version and see if there is a single person besides me who is willing to invest time into that?
>
You are forgetting two people who are already investing time into 
Subsurface-mobile: Marco Martin and me. We did that even though we are not 
divers and therefore not Subsurface users. We did not do it as part of our job 
description, either. Of course we did not invest the time out of pure altruism, 
either. We did it in hopes that we'd get feedback and maybe even some 
contributions to Kirigami in return, and we did get both and are very happy 
about that! Regardless of the motives, however, after spending considerable 
amounts of hours reading and replying to threads on this list, and knowing that 
Marco put in quite a few hours giving feedback and even writing patches for 
Subsurface-mobile, I admit that I was slightly disappointed when I read that you 
feel like you are the only one putting any time into the project. Sebas is not 
currently active in Subsurface-mobile, but he put quite a few hours into the 
initial port, too.

When I read about the C.H.I.P. ideas, I thought "Hey, they might be really up to 
something here!", and those who were active in that thread seemed to think so, 
too. Yes, the discussion there died down at some point, but for me the apparent 
reason for that was that people were unsure of whether you as the maintainer 
really supported going forward with it. Of course since this is a FOSS project, 
they could have continued even if you were not on board, but in reality, people 
are looking towards a project's "leader" (which is what you are, in fact) for 
approval on bigger ideas, anyway.

Therefore, I think that giving the "green light" for digging deeper into the 
hardware plans and pushing them forward would be likely to ignite the flame in 
many more contributors, and if successful, would also make Subsurface-mobile 
attractive for a lot more users, giving them something they currently cannot 
have with any other mobile divelog app.

So, long story short, I still see a lot of potential in Subsurface-mobile and 
would be quite disappointed if you gave up on it.

Cheers,
Thomas