[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by Valloric

"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.

You are right, "very" is too strong a word if thinking in terms of quantity of bugs or in relation to other applications. The emphasis was more from frustration at their nature. Spending an hour fine tuning a document only to have it irreperably corrupted to start again has happened so many times to me that it corrupts my view as "very buggy" when in fact that particular issue is quite possibly just "one" bug. But for me it is a showstopper. Of course there are othrs that I have seen others report too, but once you lose faith that your very next action may corrupt your book it all pales into significance really.

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.

And I don't use betas or pre-release candidates for exactly that reason, no argument there. As I said above, I havent used any of the 0.4 versions yet.

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.

Sadly the bugs I experience are extremely intermittent. I can't consistently reproduce them, without prolonged usage of Sigil. For instance the merging of book files - this is my #1 problem area. You can edit for an hour, save, try a merge and have that whole merge source page disappear off the planet. Close and reopen Sigil, try the merge again and it works.

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

Again, I said I wasn't using this yet - for precisely this "reason". IIRC people have reported that splitting files is still causing issues of files in the wrong order. Splitting and merging are my #1 usage of Sigil. Until this is fixed 100% I won't be touching 0.4 until it is officially released and others have verified this is dealt 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.

I think we will agree to disagree on Qt being like .NET in any way, shape or form, but that like discussions of programming languages is a discussion best left for elsewhere. Clearly you like it, clearly I don't. Can I offer a cross platform alternative? No. That doesn't mean I have to like it. Let's leave it at that

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.

Then you have been lucky, as I can just point to Calibre and negate this point. There are repeated posts from users saying the application does not behave or look like other Apple applications and demanding change. Linux users posting that certain file dialogs don't work on certain flavours of Linux. If I searched the Calibre codebase (or Kovid commented) I am sure there would be numerous examples of workarounds for certain platforms. You only have to hit one such case and you are in trouble without a box to test it on.

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

Oh, I don't doubt that at all, which is why I said it was only a "passing" thought. I just don't have the time or enough desperation to justify the effort. But for a few missing features and bugs Sigil is the perfect answer for me - so close and yet so far...

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.

Indeed - that was not a criticism of the amount of work you have put into Sigil, just a statement of the reality. Sigil has been Valloric and nothing but Valloric. If Valloric not available, Sigil not changed. It has been the harsh reality.

I don't blame you in any way for wanting to step away, it takes a certain type of developer to want to continue to maintain an app "forever". And like many I am grateful for your time and efforts to get it to this point, as we have had no real alternative. I wouldn't start a thread to raise my concerns, but since one existed, people asked why Calibre developers were not stepping in etc I merely offer my point of view. As a developer of 30-odd years, who has worked on Calibre for 8 months plus other open source projects, and who has locally patched/looked at the Sigil code I had perhaps a different perspective than just users wondering if there will be another release.

As I said in my original post, I sincerely do hope that something gets worked out and Sigil rules on...