Hi. I should introduce myself, because I've never posted, although I've been lurking on this list for a long time. I'm more a distro hacker than a browser hacker. But enough about that. I still remember how I was delighted when I discovered dillo, and how small it was, and its amazing power-to-weight ratio. There is clearly a need for a browser like dillo. Firefox, Seamonkey, Opera, all use a lot of memory and run slowly on all but modern machines. There are numerous Linux distros consisting entirely of software that will run happily on a 64 MB PII, except for the huge lump of a browser. DSL has Firefox and Puppy has Seamonkey, for example. (They both have dillo but don't consider it sufficient on its own.) This is something like putting armour plate on a formula one car. If dillo had tabs (without prescribing the window manager), multiple languages, and solid enough cookie and SSL supprt that one could read webmail from it easily, it would be the browser that fit most perfectly with the small Linux distros. And yet they are all talking about dropping it because it's no longer much use on the modern web. And yet every day I wish that I had in my hands a dillo that was just that tiny bit more capable than 0.8.5 is, and was known to be under active development and maintenance. Something more general than lynx/links/elinks and a lot lighter on resources than Gecko-based browsers and that ilk. Like many others, I have gradually become pessimistic about dillo ever being revived. I have watched it being dropped from distro after distro, and even pleaded with the port maintainer (unsuccessfully) for it to be kept in OpenBSD. Clearly there is a problem here, and it's not to do with FLTK not releasing (they do) or lack of interest in a light-to-mid-weight browser, because loads of people want exactly that. --- Jorge Arellano Cid <jcid@dillo.org> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 08:45:38AM -0300, Alan Carvalho de Assis wrote:
I don't understand why nice projects as Dillo, Linux-Tiny and other don't attract developers.
Sourceforge has like 100,000+ projects listed. There is no shortage of willing developers out there. So why doesn't dillo get developers? One reason for projects to lose their attractiveness is when project ownership narrows too far. This is happening right now with at least 2 Linux distros that I could name, but won't. People in the community are becoming reluctant to contribute to a project that is held under the narrow control of a small cadre. On the other hand, projects that have wide ownership are thriving and multiplying.
Actually, Dillo attracts developers, it is the high time dedication and specific expertise it demands what stops most of them.
Are you sure about that? I ask because I'm not convinced it's a shortage of smart people in the world. I worry that it's the relentless focus on getting funding before development starts again, or the indecision caused by being unable to decide whether to proceed with forking off a new project from 0.8.5, the last version that would build on multiple platforms, or to wait for Jorge to release the FLTK code that he has and let people work on it. If Jorge were to declare that he will never release the FLTK port, there are people out there who would probably continue development starting from the 0.8.5 codebase. If Jorge were to declare that he will make the existing FLTK code available for others to develop, I'd be surprised if several people didn't step forward to help. So, from where I'm sitting, it looks like the real problem is uncertainty about which way to go, and perhaps if Jorge were to let go of either his hopes of making a living from dillo or of total control of the dillo code, there might be a way forward for further development. I would further suggest that if Jorge doesn't have the time for development work on dillo, he would nevertheless be the first choice for the overall architect of the ongoing development. Being architect of a successful project that releases useful code may be a better result, career-wise, than being commercial owner of a project that failed to release a complete unit version and faded away. But that would be for Jorge to decide. I hope that he will decide, one way or the other, and decide soon, and make that decision public soon as well. Now, I expect that I'll get a few hasty flames in response to this mail, but I don't mean to attack anyone personally. That said, there is a *very* small number of people who could make a huge difference to the dillo project by their actions, and I hope that they will read this message as constructive. I would still hope, and would definitely like to be able, to draw on dillo as a working solution in the future, as would many others. Sincere best wishes to *all* recipients on the dillo-dev- list, Mark PS Apologies for the length of this message. I guess it shows that I kept quiet for too long. ___________________________________________________________ Now you can scan emails quickly with a reading pane. Get the new Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html