[Valloric]

Originally Posted by crutledge

I may be "whistling by the graveyard" but I have become concerned about the future of Sigil. I would really hate to see it go the way of Book Designer.

It would be difficult for Sigil to go the way of BD. BD was not open source, and no one could continue BD development after the original developer left.

Sigil is OSS, and that guarantees at least the option of someone else taking up the reins (and someone else will). Nothing of the sort was possible with BD. I cannot overstate the importance of this distinction.

Originally Posted by crutledge

Without a central clearing house for enhancements, additions, and changes, versions of Sigil could proliferate bringing chaos and failure.

The end is not quite nigh, so let's ease up a bit on the doom-and-gloom.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

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.

"Buggy"... it depends on your POV. "Very buggy"... I think that's going a bit too far, but that's just IMHO. I'm well aware that other people's experiences with Sigil have been different from my own. Personally, I pretty much never encounter bugs in Sigil. This is selection bias, I know: when I do find a bug in Sigil, I fix it immediately. So my workflow is extremely bug-free. I realize regular users don't have this option.

I'm not going to deny that there haven't been data-loosing bugs. There have been. Still, any major bugs in release versions are usually fixed fairly quickly. Major bugs in the betas and RC's are, well, in the betas and RC's. It's not an official release for a reason.

Major bugs can't magically disappear over night. Someone has to notice them, report them and fix them. Step one is easy. Step three is harder, but it seems that step two is the hardest one. If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: I can't fix a bug that hasn't been reported. And the report has to be good, i.e. reproducible. Otherwise I'm shooting ducks in the dark.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

I haven't used 0.4 yet, which Valloric himself has admitted is "buggy as hell" on these forums.

0.4 is at RC1. It's called pre-release software for a reason.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

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.

The key data-loss bug in Sigil pre-0.4 is what people have called "the pink screen of death". You know, the one where you get a big pink square at top of your Book View display that tells you shit has happened. This and other problems related to the same root cause have been fixed in 0.4 with a dialog that informs users of well-formed errors in the Code View when you make a mistake. So a whole slew of data-loss bugs has been fixed. Frankly, I don't know of any major data-loss bug left (AFAIK).

0.4 has brought its own set of bugs, but those will be ironed out before the first "real" release.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

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.

This. This a billion times over. I can't tell you how many people I've met face-to-face that have said they'd love to work on Sigil, but it's written in C++ which they either don't know well enough or don't care to learn.

If I were starting Sigil today, I wouldn't do it in C++ for this and only this reason. C++ has justifiably been called an "experts-only" language. There's nothing more dangerous than someone who thinks they know C++ "well enough". It's not a language you can just "pick up". Well, it's a language you think you can pick up, but only after 10 years of daily use and professional betterment do you realize the depth of your ignorance. I've been using C++ for over 10 years, I've written many, many tens of thousands of lines of code in it (maybe even hundreds of thousands), I've read countless books on it and I still wouldn't call myself an expert in it. Far from it. Frankly, I don't think a C++ expert really exists (this is a sentiment that even C++ leaders have expressed on many occasions).

But we are where we are. Sigil is in C++ and there's no going around that.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

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.

It goes without saying, Python is the easiest programming language to pick up that I know of (and I know a few). I've been teaching my 13-year-old brother programming using Python. He's smart, and learns fast. Python makes it effortless to teach CS concepts. There's a reason why MIT switched to Python for their introductory programming courses.

OTOH, Python comes with it's own bag of drawbacks, not the least of which is the poor run-time performance.

But let's not go into this discussion; it's the type of discussion that never ends.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

The other thorn for contribution is the challenge of cross platform. Apart from Qt just being filth to work with

Qt is absolutely awesome. It's like .NET for C++. On the other hand, QtWebKit, which is one module of many in the Qt Framework, is a smoldering piece of canine excrement.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

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?

This is exaggerated. Qt abstracts platform differences well enough that you very rarely have to venture off your dev platform to make sure that everything works on other platforms. As someone who has been working on a popular cross-platform application for the last two and a half years, I think I can say this with some authority.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Personally I have given passing thought a few times to writing an alternative

Making an epub editor is harder than it looks. Trust me.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

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.

Every user has his own set of pet features. The problem is that everyone has a different set of pet features.

I have yet to grow a third arm. I've been concentrating really hard on making it happen, but the bitch just won't come out.

Originally Posted by crutledge

I guess that I'm not the only Chicken Little. I'm afraid that Sigil, as it stands at this moment, is as far as it will go.

RIP

I'll repeat what I said previously, "The end is not quite nigh, so let's ease up a bit on the doom-and-gloom. ".