[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Chris Travers]

if I may be so bold as to jump in.....

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 6:57 AM, Simon Spiegel <simon at simifilm.ch> wrote:
>
> On 01.08.2012, at 15:45, Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Simon Spiegel wrote:
>>
>> > And it might be a good idea to come up with ideas how we can find this someone.
>>
>> "ideas how we can ..." involves discussion, unless you are
>> advocating implementation by fiat, which I am sure you are
>> not.  So what it would seem you are advocating is that we
>> cease technical discussions and move on to personnel
>> discussions -- well, I for one am perfectly happy to leave
>> the personnel discussion to you and to others : technicalities,
>> problems and potential solutions interest me enormously,
>> and I am happy to continue to debate those; "who does what"
>> is a matter of little or no concern,
>
> I guess it is of little or no concern if you're not interested in actually getting something done. As a user I'm much more interested in how I can get working tools.
>
> But since I'm not interested in proving my own point – that discussions on the future of *TeX tend to drift somewhere where things don't get done –, I'm stopping this here.
>

What I am getting out of a lot of the discussions so far is that there
is a lot of work to be done and not a lot of people doing things that
need to be done.  I am primarily a user of XeTeX and LaTeX but what we
are talking about  what is essentially a community problem rather than
a technical problem.  Yes, TeX has a large following, but how many
people are working on LuaTeX and XeTeX themselves?

The key question in my view is how to enable people to get involved.
To this end, I think you really need to try to get involvement from
both coders and non-coders.

Some thing non-coders can do in (almost) any open source project:

1)  Pick something you really want to see done
2)  Talk to people about what is required, write up concerns,
obstacles, to-do lists, etc.
3)  Talk to other people find out how widespread the demand is.  If
there sufficient demand, look at organizing funding
4)  Offer to collaborate as testers, etc. on the new feature.  You can
do this even if you don't code.
5)  Advocacy work for the project in general

Often folks who are coding are too busy to get to some of the other
stuff and users are better positioned to help try to organize some
support for the project.   Developer community is where it is at
though.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers