Re: Hot List

On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 10:52:19 +0100, Harriet Bazley wrote:
> > surely you can work together to either produce a patch, or to persuade
> > someone who might already know how to code in C to produce a patch.
>
> I'm not sure it's very realistic to expect a random C coder out of the
> kindness of his heart to download the source to a program of the complexity
> of a web browser, work out how one specific piece of it currently functions,
> and alter that part without breaking anything else... but I suppose that's
> how open source software is intended to work...

Oddly enough that's exactly how it's intended to work -- it's certainly how
pretty much every contributor to NetSurf got started.

You don't think we all sat around one day and said "Hey, let's write a web
browser" do you?

To turn your argument back around --

I'm not sure it's very realistic to expect project maintainers to continue to
support a platform which none of them run and which has no active maintainer to
help -- where despite there clearly being a number of engineers who still run
the project and who have the requisite skills, noone can be found to provide
what little support would be needed to keep the project on-track. But I suppose
that's how platform support atrophies and is eventually removed.

D.

--
Daniel Silverstone http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
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