[ JDiff-users ] status update

[mike d. <md...@st...>]

hello fine folks-

i figure i've been avoiding it long enough, seeing that it's been two months
since i've said anything about jDiff publically, so it's time for me to speak
up.

as is well evidenced by the lack of any substantial activity in months, i am
declaring my interest in working on jDiff dead. to be honest, it was probably
immature and inappropriate for me to try to "take charge" of the project in the
first place, since i had never found much use for these sorts of utilities
previously and had no particular personal interest motivating me to work on it.
on the other hand, i did do a fair amount of work on it and pulled together
something that i'd consider at least halfway decent, which is more than anyone
else did. i should hope i didn't scare anyone away from working on such a
project by my taking up the task (if half-heartedly), but that doesn't seem to
me to have been the case.

to be frank, the root cause of my move to finally make this decision
definitively is that i don't want to start any new work in Java as it currently
stands. at least not on a Swing application. as far as i can see, there will be
no way of running a Swing application using only free software in the near
future. possibly within a year, maybe two (of course, i'd love to be proved
wrong by someone doing it tomorrow, but i doubt it will happen any time soon).
more than that, i just don't like Java that much. it's cool and has its place,
but i would like to be writing maybe hundreds of lines of Java, not thousands.

i like jEdit and my involvement in the jEdit community, so i doubt that i will
be extricating myself from the suffocating grip of proprietary software before
there is a viable free alternative. all i have to say on the matter is "Fuck
Sun" for making it impossible for me to spend my time writing javax.swing for
Classpath, just because their crappy docs led me to peek naively at their even
scarier code.

i don't know what to do with the project. i'm aware of a couple of
alternatives:

1. someone with the requisite skills who already knows about jDiff is looking
   for a project. they like jDiff. Voila! the project is alive again.

2. http://unmaintained.sourceforge.net/ - for all i know, someone already
   submitted it behind my back. who knows? i would rather not do this, but i
   will if no one is interested.

i am open to suggestions.

-md