Re: [j-devel] J-the-editor

[Jan-Wijbrand K. <jw...@n-...>]

Hi,


I was pleasantly suprised by the quick responses to my post. I got two
on-list replies and one off-list reply. That, so far, makes up for a
known userbase of four people.

Usually inquiries like hit on only the top of the iceberg, but I'm not
so sure in this particular case.

Anyway, I see a couple of ways things can go from here on:

1) Everything stays as it is. J will see hardly any updates, and the
people that chose to use J are basically on their own in keeping J
running for themselves.

2) Someone steps up as "the maintainer for J" like someone did for the
ABCL implementation. At least the effort for keeping J's codebase
compatible with whatever the most common Java versions are can then be
shared. Maybe there's even some patches lying around that can be applied
and released.

3) A group of people want to give J a second life and starts actively
maintaining, possibly even developing, the code base (I know I have some
user-interface related ideas still for J), tries to reach out to new
users, does some marketing etc.

Actually, I don't see 3) happening without 2). Similarly, 2) can only
happen if there're enough people in 1).

Do you think that, with the four of use, it might be worthwhile to start
sharing some efforts in keeping J running? Like testing J on various
Java versions and platforms (I tried compiling it today on a fresh
Ubuntu install, and it didn't work - I still need to find out why and
report the findings).


Kind regards,
jw

--
Jan-Wijbrand Kolman
jw...@n-...