On Saturday 06 of September 2008, Davide Cavalca wrote:
Il giorno sab, 06/09/2008 alle 02.58 +0200, syrius.ml@no-log.org ha
scritto:
but vdr has not evolved for years ! no real new features, it's still meant to be used with one ff dvb-s card. there's a plugin interface but most of the time you don't want to hear about bugs when somebody is using a plugin. what's the point then ? And, what about this blackmail thing ? Wouldn't it be simpler to say "i don't have time anymore, my needs won't evolve and i don't want to code features i won't use, please carry on !" ?
I'm neither Klaus not a regular of this list, but I think you're not being fair here: Klaus has every right to say he won't develop on a community tree; it is, after all, his own free time. BTW, if I remember well, Klaus has coded several features (i.e. subtitles) he himself said he didn't use. Like it or not, VDR is a "cathedral"-style project: this has led to higher code quality and very good stability, at the expense of a slower development pace and the lack of some bleeding-edge features in the mainline. If you want those features, you can use a patch posted on this list (e.g. for hdtv, sourcecaps) or use a plugin (e.g. for teletext subtitles). Many distributions include those patches or provide a way for the user to easily appy them. Of course, you're also free to develop your own patches for new features: if they're good enough, I'm sure they'll eventually find their way into the mainline, as it happened, e.g., with the shutdown handling rewrite some time ago.
You say you want to fork it: what would you accomplish with that? It's not as if the code would magically write itself. I've yet to see a single prospective developer say "if it were forked I'd write X". (And, BTW, there's nothing forbidding him to write X in form of a patch and post it on this list.) On the other hand, by forking you'd probably lose Klaus, who has written by himself the majority of VDR code and knows it like no one else.
Finally, I personally fail to see why people switching to MythTV is a bad thing; VDR is not a religion, I think everyone should use whichever software he thinks suits best his needs. I'm very happy with VDR and won't be switching anytime soon.
I wanted to tell my opinion to this list too, but I 100% agree with you Davide and I think I'm not able to tell it better way.
BR,
Ales