mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Daniele Pighin <address@hidden>]

Alle 19:04, sabato 8 febbraio 2003, michael graffam ha scritto:

> My point is this: the GUI works, today. It may not be
> perfect, but it works, looks nice and serves its
> function.

agreed.

> .. in 6 months probably every
> Octave user would be a TeXmacs user.

That would be absolutely *great*, especially for Octave users.
Which I'm not :-), but I'm joking, I understand the importance of these 
features.
Nonetheless, keep in mind that there are many users who use texmacs just for 
its typesetting functions, and I think they aren't few at all.

> A feature freeze kills this line of work and that of
> attracting new users.

Wait a moment, Joris already said he doesn't want to work at the UI issue 
himself, because he doesn't like that kind of programming.
Therefore, the feature freeze issue is overcome, as he and those others who, 
like him, don't want to spend time on UI tasks will keep working at the 
internals, providing new features and so on.
So, I'd rather shift the focus: those who are concerned about the UI issue 
could concetrate on it, which would be very good as well.

> Work for six months to slap on a gtk GUI and TeXmacs
> is still useless to the Octave crowd.

Agreed, but (I hope!) "TeXmacs users" [eventually] is a _superset_ of "Octave 
users", not a congruence. It's flexibility and features make it valuable for 
a very wide range of tasks.
I myself am a student, and had many friends using texmacs, mostly for 
typesetting jobs, thesis, papers and so on.
Many in my conditions would love to contribute with their programming skills, 
but presently I just *can't*.

> I'm all for it! I just don't want a feature freeze to
> limit other avenues of attracting users.

Ok, but someone should dedicate to this task to go somewhere.
My argument about feature freezing was rather a call to start working 
actively 
and decisely on this topic.
If I go to the wiki I see these pages about porting issues:
<http://www.alqua.com/tmresources/port to perl-gtk>
<http://www.alqua.com/tmresources/port to KDE>
<http://www.alqua.com/tmresources/port to Guile-Gtk>
<http://www.alqua.com/tmresources/GUI independence>
The first is the most recently updated: Oct 18, 2002.

So, there are many ideas, but there's no clue on what alternative (Perl-gtk, 
kde, guile-gtk...) will be the chosen one, and especially *if* one ever will.
If something was clearly planned, maybe someone would start working on it, 
even new programmers, but it is clear that nobody would invest his/her own 
time into something that might never be.

A clear call to the arms might be helpful... well, I think so :)

Daniele