Technical information / social issue about Gedit Technology and Tepl

[swilmet (Sébastien Wilmet)]

This happened again, a feeling of harassment around gedit and Tepl. See the discussion in the screenshot below:

I prefer to discuss it here, and to be constructive. This is more a social problem, but I think with more technical information things should be clearer and resolve things (at least that’s what I hope).

gedit is not developed in a monorepo, instead it is split into several git repositories. In 2001, GtkSourceView (a library) has been created. Then a bit later gedit has been ported to it. And this was successful, GtkSourceView is re-usable and is used by many applications (including the LaTeX editor that I started to develop in 2009).

Tepl (which means “Text editor product line”, a library that I created in 2016) was initially meant as additional features for GtkSourceView, with the ability to iterate on the API more freely (nowadays Tepl doesn’t have API stability guarantees; there are soname bumps only).

There is also gspell (that I created in 2015), libgedit-amtk (created in 2018, also by me) and this year libgedit-gfls (for file loading and saving).

All these libraries are now regrouped under the Gedit Technology umbrella.

But at some point in the past, gedit (the application) became unmaintained. Nobody was motivated or had the time to develop it anymore. When I picked up gedit development again, I naturally ported some parts to Tepl, progressively. Then my motivation went down again, and other developers reverted the use of Tepl in gedit (this was a misunderstanding of how gedit was developed, i.e., not as a monorepo).

So, long story short, gedit is not developed the same as LibreOffice or the Linux kernel, it involves several modules It allows code sharing between different text editors.

That’s it. If you have questions, if you want to discuss this, feel free to add a comment.

Thank you.

(The above screenshot, the discussion on a small merge request, again demonstrates that Free Software developers need to develop a thick skin, and it’s not always easy).

[swilmet (Sébastien Wilmet)]

I saw Jordan Petridis’s comment this morning, and I really didn’t appreciate it (as can be seen above), especially the “Until tepl is removed that is.” sentence, since I’m the main author of Tepl, and considering its history with gedit.

(I did a screenshot because it’s - after all - public information, but can be edited/removed on GitLab. Here is the link to the merge request in question).

Now that the day is over and did a long walk outside, my mood is calm again. But please, don’t write such comments again. There are human beings involved behind these little projects.

Thank you for your understanding.

[swilmet (Sébastien Wilmet)]

Another follow-up: first, the merge request is merged.

Frank Dana (the merge request contributor) has explained why Jordan has been contacted, so it explains things.

I’ll take a small rest for a few days anyway.

Since it’s a social issue and it involves human beings, I thought it was a good idea to bring back my small website / blog (at some point I didn’t want to blog anymore), to better know me and my contributions.

On the technical side, if you’ve never heard about Tepl, see its introduction and table of contents. (note that there is a plan to rename it to libgedit-tepl, like it was done for Amtk → libgedit-amtk).

Have a nice week
Sébastien

[slembcke (Scott)]

Yeah… I’ve been there, It’s not great. (though for open source game/simulation code where my users have a different vibe) Though it reminds me of how nice it is to hear a user say how they appreciate my stuff. So…

I use Gedit all the time! It’s the slick, simple, and perfectly useful text editor for everything I don’t want an IDE for. I use it whenever I need to take down some notes, do some writing, make a simple script, or edit a config file. It’s one of those “boring” bits of software in that I know exactly what to expect from it and it does that perfectly without surprise.

[swilmet (Sébastien Wilmet)]

Thanks a lot for your kind words and feedback !

Yes, gedit is still there and still developed, although at a different pace.

[swilmet (Sébastien Wilmet)]

To summarize, I didn’t have all the context around Jordan’s comment on the GitLab merge request.

I should have thought instead that everybody in the community act in good faith.

Edit: and, thankfully it didn’t turn into a flamewar, neither here nor on GitLab; which is a good thing (wisdom). We learn by making mistakes. So I take it as just experience.