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Just to offer some info for anyone wondering. I'm one of the guys who stepped in to help give Sigil a kickstart after John took over. I worked pretty intensively (but enjoyably) seven days a week for around 4 months with Dave and John in getting up to speed with the codebase and then helping add a large number of new features that were of interest. As well as stomping on many of the most painful bugs or quirks that had irritated me ever since I first started using it.
IMO the reality for anyone working on an open source project (where they are not getting paid for it) is that there comes a time where you have to step away as you just cannot spend every minute of your life writing code on top of a day job without at some point getting burnt out, losing interest or having time/financial pressures. In my case, I had nothing more I needed to put in features wise and we had got Sigil to the most stable it had ever been in its history, plus I need to start my day job contracting again to pay the bills!
It is a shame things have tapered off since. That was an intense period for all of us so it was inevitable there would be a lull afterwards. It does what I need it to for my very simple requirements, and right now I work 100 hour weeks in my day job and when not doing that I have other open source development etc to work on. It was never going to be a long term thing for me.
Right now I don't really see the sky falling in quite just yet. I'm not using the very latest Sigil but AFAIK it is stable and working. That it is not actively being hammered with new features is not necessarily a bad thing - it is a product which for the limited needs of the majority of users has reached a point of maturity. Yes there will always be commercial users pushing the boundaries who would love "more" from it and I have no facts at all to support this but surely they are the minority. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense at all - clearly with the ongoing forum support and perhaps even financial from the comments I have seen they have been a very important part of Sigil's life. However unless a particular feature/requirement happens to tickle the personal fancy of a developer it just won't happen unless someone pays a developer to do it. As Sigil is such a small niche in scope and userbase combined with technology choices that it was always going to struggle to be self sustaining as a non-commercial product.
Admittedly I have stepped away big time since my involvement, I haven't even visited these forums until today. So maybe there is some new EPUB specification or whatever on the horizon which means Sigil will stop working at some point. If that happens... well, we shall see. As long as there is no alternative product, there is always the possibility someone will step up to help John out again to "save the day", then while they are there knock off some of the backlog.
To anyone contemplating getting involved - if you want a C++ project to dabble with and a top bloke in John to be in touch with then I say go for it. I greatly enjoyed the debates with Dave and John we had during the period I worked on it. Clearly there is an "opening" there now for someone to step up, even for a little while to keep things chipping along. The codebase may sound a bit scary but in reality it is not that bad, even for C++ noobs like me. Where things do come a bit more unstuck is the need for cross platform support (I was the Windows guy, John was our only Mac guru and Dave with John covered Linux) so ensuring something works "for everyone" is a challenge. However Sigil clearly continues to have some enthusiastic supporters in the forums and with John's experience I am sure that is nothing that cannot be overcome one way or another.
As for John - kudos to you mate for staying at the coalface for as long as you did (and to Dave as well until relatively recently). I wish you all the best in helping keep Sigil roll forward in the understandly more limited involvement you can put in at this point.
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