Starting a libwww survey

Hello,

One of the problems I've seen with libwww is that some developers and users
drop out after some months of using it. This may be because of lack of 
documentation, libwww's complexity, limitations in the architecture, lack
of people who know the core parts of libwww, or some other reason.

Citing a recent message:

> However, I have to admit it, I dumped libwww and I am in the process of
> writing a tailored C++ library for handling HTTP and FTP traffic, after I
> had to tackle so many problems in such a complicated piece of
> software.

I'd like to conduct a survey so that we can get a better idea of
what are libwww's limitations, where new developments/effort should
be invested, how many people are actively using it.

At best, I hope that this survey will result in a plan to improve libwww
or to its succesor.

At worst, we'll be able to put an FAQ of known problems so that people
know what they're getting into.

In both cases, the idea is to make a better use of everyone's time. If people
want to make a new library or enhance another one, it's fine with me. However,
it'd be nice to have as many developers as possible in such a project in
order to have something interesting and well documented and with a solid
core team.

Let me add a note explaining W3C's current involvement with libwww. Right now,
we host libwww's CVS database, home site, and related mailing lists. We have
two applications that use libwww, Amaya and WinCommander. I'm the only
one of the staff that works with libwww currently. I consider myself as
another libwww user and I contribute patches to problems I detect during
my Amaya developement. I also help applying and testing new patches, taking
care that the quality of those patches is up to level, giving new
write access to our CVS base, maintaining the mailing list, and preparing
new releases. There no other official W3C present or future plans
concerning libwww development. Note that besides my Amaya contributions, the
rest of my libwww tasks is  voluntary and I do them when I find time.

I propose to conduct the survey in a separate mailing list and to post
the results to this list (www-lib) and to the libwww home page.

I'll forward the survey questions in a separate message. To avoid
cluttering this list with the survey, I set up a temporary mailing list
to archive the survey answers (www-lib-survey@w3.org).

-Jose

Received on Friday, 22 September 2000 04:53:35 UTC