[Greasemonkey] Greasemonkey development has stopped; time for 1.0?

[Aaron Boodman]

Hi Gareth, all,

I'm glad people are still so interested in Greasemonkey. I am also
interested in working on GM again, now that GBS is shipped.

The features you mention wanting to add to GM sound great! I would
love any contributions you or anyone else would like to make, and
would encourage you to give working on GM a shot before branching it
(though you certainly have that right).

So how can we make this work? I don't really know. I realize it's been
very difficult to contribute to GM up until now, and I want to change
that. After all, it's clear I don't exactly have tons of time, and I'd
love all the free improvements on GM I can get.

The main problem I think from your point of view is that there is no
clarity on the process for getting a feature into GM. The main problem
from my point of view is that I don't have visibility on what people
are working on or planning to contribute to GM. I get a patch suddenly
that isn't implemented the way I would have liked, or implements a
different feature than I would have wanted. It takes a long time and a
lot of effort to review the patch retroactively and try and come up
with alternate approaches. In the meantime of course, I'm changing the
trunk and the patch gets out of date.

I think these issues can be solved by adding a little structure to the
contribution process.

Perhaps we could organize a roadmap. For each GM version number, we
can list the things people want to implement, maybe in a wiki, and put
names of contributors next to them. Each feature would link off to a
bit of discussion on how the feature is planned to be implemented.

Once we all agree on the plan for a feature, you can go ahead and
implement it and there won't be any surprises when it comes time to
integrate. I think I can be much more responsive to contributions like
this.

Over time, when people prove that they share the same values and goals
as Jeremy and I, we can talk about adding commiters, but for now, I
will reserve veto rights.


I realize this is just a very rough sketch, but what do people think
of something like this?

- a


On 10/8/06, Jeremy Dunck <jdunck at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Arvid Jakobsson <arvid.jakobsson at gmail.com>
> Date: Oct 7, 2006 4:48 AM
> Subject: Re: [Greasemonkey] Greasemonkey development has stopped; time for 1.0?
> To: greasemonkey at mozdev.org
>
>
> As a userscripts author, this is what I would like to see in a new
> version of greasemonkey, plus your suggestions:
>
> 1) A few new GM_* API:s, like GM_get/setClipboard, GM_closeTab (maybe useful)
> 2) Regexp includes, with the ability to see what regex include was matched.
> 3) Some kind of webstorage?
>
> On 10/7/06, Gareth Andrew <freega at freegarethandrew.org> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I have noticed that greasemonkey development activity has stopped -
> > apart from the refactoring which aaron did when merging back into the
> > trunk, nothing has changed in over a year.
> >
> > I think this is due to a combination of two factors
> >     1) Greasemonkey is "perfect" - that is it has a stable set of
> > features that cover all the major use-cases for people wanting to write
> > "simple site extensions", new features would be considered bloat.
> >     2) The greasemonkey development team no longer wants to develop
> > greasemonkey.  I can't speak for any of them, but I guess it is because
> > either they believe (1) or they are too busy/have moved on to greener
> > pastures.
> >
> > While these are both valid reasons, I would not like to see greasemonkey
> > development stop for good.
> >
> > As I see it one way forward might be to create a 1.0 release of
> > greasemonkey, this version would be maintained with bug-fixes, extra
> > locales etc, but the feature set and api would be frozen as it is now.
> > Maintenance of this version should be a relatively low-effort task.
> >
> > This would free us up to talk about greasemonkey 2.0, which would be the
> > release containing any new features.  I would like to have a
> > conversation about what user script developers might like to see in a
> > new greasemonkey, my wishlist would be:
> > 1) Greasemonkey Imports
> > 2) A better storage solution
> > 3) Access to some chrome privileged methods especially = canvas.drawWindow()
> >
> > In order to build greasemonkey2 the project will have to encourage more
> > developers to take part in developing greasemonkey.  I think one of the
> > things that might make this easier is to draw up a democratic process
> > (eg. [2]) so that it is easier for new blood to be incorporated into the
> > greasemonkey team.
> >
> > Thoughts anyone? Aaron?
> >
> > Gareth.
> >
> > [1] -
> > http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Drawing_Graphics_with_Canvas#Rendering_Web_Content_Into_A_Canvas
> > [2] - I particularly like the apache jakarta groups's process -
> > http://jakarta.apache.org/site/decisions.html
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> >
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