[sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar

[J.M. Maurer]

On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 09:36 +0200, Simon Schampijer wrote:
> 
> Write, Read, TamTam, Paint, Record, Memorize to name a few have been
> really struggling lately. There are probably various reasons for that
> - one might be I that the activities have been taken out from the base
> system another one that the overall development has been really fast
> and no entry points/good documentation could be found. And well, the
> windows news were not helpful either.

You are missing 'funding':

Most of Write's development was funded by OLPC, which gave us what we
have today. Expecting volunteers to hack on Write is unrealistic at this
point. Let me clarify:

Write is written in Python and uses the pyabiword bindings around
AbiWord's GTK canvas widget extensively. The GTK widget and pyabiword
bindings were extended as I went along, to expose the functionality
Write needed. Currently almost 100% of pyabiword's functionality is used
by Write.
What this means is that if Write needs new feature X, it will almost
always require new functionality to be exposed through pyabiword *and*
AbiWord's GTK canvas widget.
This will generally be too hard for volunteers who just want to spend a
few hours hacking on something fun.

Cheers,
  Marc