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I think people are right to be concerned about Sigil's future IMHO. There are a lot of good things about it which is why it has been a welcome tool, but it has some really serious issues. For a start, it is and has always been very buggy. I don't mean minor annoyance bugs of which there are many, I mean the most dangerous kind of bugs that lose book content or ignore changes. These made me lose any confidence in the software. I haven't used 0.4 yet, which Valloric himself has admitted is "buggy as hell" on these forums. Of course we hope he can do something about the most serious ones before he leaves, but that is a legacy I don't want to take on. Unfortunately many of these bugs are of the extremely intermittent difficult to repeat kind, which are horrible to try to fix without intimate knowledge of the code.
My other main issue is the choice of C++ as a language for an oss application. It reduces your pool of potential developers as less are enthused to work on such an app in their free time. I didn't know Python before I started work on Calibre, but I had enough interest to learn it to do enough to contribute to that. It has a far lower barrier to entry for temporary contributors. I am not saying that I in any way like developing in python btw or that it should have been Vallorics choice, just that as a combination for Calibre it worked.
The other thing that Python enabled over C++ was the plugin architecture that Calibre has. As a contributor I could make my initial contributions as standalone isolated pieces of code. It didn't matter that my Python was not up to main codebase standard. I could add a menu item of functionality or whatever without impacting anyone else or depriving the main app developer of their time to code review or rewrite it.
The other thorn for contribution is the challenge of cross platform. Apart from Qt just being filth to work with, how many developers out there have the resources of a Mac as well as a Linux and windows boxes, plus the will to test everything three times?
I did take a local copy of Sigil at one point and make some changes to it for features I wanted, intending to publish some of them back. However calibre plugin development vamped all of my spare time and will continue to do so. Hence I have no bandwidth to learn yet another codebase in intimate detail, particularly in C++. I suspect other developers are in a similar boat. An application like this requires that you learn the whole thing inside and out and while the original developer of course has interest for a while in doing that, picking up someone else's codebase for an app as big as Sigil with all it's issues and Valloric posting he is intending to completely step away is an intimidating task for someone to take on for zero return as a hobby project.
Personally I have given passing thought a few times to writing an alternative, as Sigil development had gone feature wise in a direction of interest to Valloric as is entirely his right, but that has continued to delay with his limited dev time a stable release of ncx mgmt and of course still no spell checking. For my own needs I could care less about flight check stuff etc, as I just want something to split and merge, regex and wysiwyg spell checking. I know others out there enjoy the other feature and cross platform support, I'm just speaking as a user who wants to clean up his own books for his personal library. However as I said above Calibre took over all my time and there is a tremendous amount of dev involved in an app like this as typified by the several years Sigil has taken to get to this point.
Sorry if the post sounds negative, but unless those who can afford to pay someone to develop this further I am not confident this will go anywhere after Valloric. I hope that there is a gifted C++ developer out there who fancies a challenge to prove those of us who share these concerns wrong, it would be a shame to see this die.
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