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

[Gareth Andrew]

Aaron Boodman wrote:
> 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.
Awesome!
> 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).
I never meant to imply that I intend GM2  to be an unofficial fork (I 
think forking is often a fate worse than death for most open source 
projects), I was just suggesting we change the versioning system.  I 
remember a discussion about a year ago (aside: does anyone know a good 
web archive of this list?) on the topic of feature bloat in 
greasemonkey.  I can't remember what the consensus was then, but I think 
history proves that the current feature set hits a sweet spot in the 
trade-off between functionality and bloat.  By branching we can go right 
back to the drawing board and decide on what principles we should accept 
new features.  For example, I would currently be against adding access 
to  browser bookmarks because it crosses an imaginary line between 
"site-extensions" and "browser-extensions", however depending on what 
other features are proposed I could see this becoming part of GM2. 

> 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 trunk and the patch gets out of date.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.
I think a roadmap and a wiki would be immensely useful.  I also think a 
developer mailing list may help, since it makes it easier to find prior 
discussions of features, and might help new developers understand the 
process. 
>
> 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 would never want you to give up your veto. 
>
> I realize this is just a very rough sketch, but what do people think
> of something like this?
>
It all sounds good to me.

Gareth.



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