[qet] [en] Resignation from the QElectroTech project

["Xavier G." <xavier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

The QElectroTech project now exists for more than 6 years. It originally 
started out as a common project between two students: the first one was 
studying electrotechnics and needed a free software to draw electric 
diagrams while the second one was studying I.T. and needed a good idea of 
real-life software to be implemented in order to improve its development 
skills. As you already know, the first student is Benoît and I am that 
second student.

I strove to maintain QElectroTech for a few years after it appeared Benoît 
did not need it for its now-professional interests. Having no skills in the 
field of electricity, this maintenance was done with a distribution of roles 
similar to what occurs in the world of professional development: 
contributors involved in the field of electrotechnics patiently explained 
their functional requirements to me so I could implement them in the 
software itself. The list of those requirements grew quickly, so that 
multiplying their count by the amount of time required to accomplish them in 
a correct way guarantees that QElectroTech will keep a small development 
team busy for years.

Unfortunately, it became harder and harder for me to find time, mainly for 
the usual reasons that make volunteering so scarce: professional life, 
personal life, other projets, hobbies and experiments, etc, etc, etc.

Today, the statement is pretty clear: my free time is getting too rare for 
me to keep finding any motivation to work on a software I cannot use and 
which does not contribute anymore to my professional expertise. I do not 
doubt things would have been different if implementing new features in this 
software had served my personal or professional life. Also, I insist on the 
"work" wording: despite the usage of a renowned framework, developing a 
portable GUI application requires organization, strictness, thoroughness and 
patience. Considering QElectroTech, this is increased by the presence of 
various interactive canvas and the necessity not to break the different file 
formats.

Eventually, I maintained QElectroTech mainly because I thought it was not 
appropriate to leave an application without somebody to transmit it to. 
However, I recently figured out that perhaps it was better to explicitly 
disengage myself from the project to attract potential volunteers, 
interested by the necessity to keep developing this software, rather than 
letting the whole world believe that QElectroTech is still actively 
maintained.

I tried to stay a little more in the project, typically "at least until the 
0.3 version", but neither the last nor the next released version have a real 
impact on the topic.

For all these reasons, I announce today my complete retirement from the 
QElectroTech project: I will not provide code anymore and will not interfere 
in the process of conception, development, debugging, packaging, 
documentation, etc. I will remain some times on the IRC channel of the 
project to ensure it is well transmitted to new hands.

I wish all the best to the QElectroTech project.

Xavier Guerrin

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