I think that some kind of project management committee where members can vote to do a release, including some having privileges to submit to Haxelib, would be beneficial to both OpenFL and Lime. A year between releases is feeling particularly rough right now because both OpenFL and Lime on Haxelib have serious bugs. The latest Lime on Haxelib can’t build for iOS. The latest OpenFL on Haxelib has text regressions that have been fixed on Github for a while. From a personal perspective, both of these are critical for Feathers UI and its upcoming stable release.
I think that the Lime restructure to remove lime-tools as a strict requirement could have some benefits, but it feels like it might be too drastic a change right now. There are sure to be some growing pains as things stabilize after the restructure, and it may take some time before everything is finally nailed down. I feel strongly that it would benefit the community to have a release before that happens to make it more likely that people can upgrade to a version with the bug fixes they need. I’m sure that some members of the community will delay upgrading if it seems like the changes are too big, or if they worry that it will actually introduce instability, and they’ll lose out on the hard work we’ve put in lately.
Unfortunately, I made what now seems like a bad assumption that the releases of Lime and OpenFL are getting very near. I planned to release the stable Feathers UI 1.0 around June. However, I’m no longer confident that can happen because I believe that a Lime restructure could take much longer. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s hard to say because the Lime restructure hasn’t had any public progress in nearly a month after the initial flurry of activity.
I agree strongly that a focus on writing documentation (especially for beginners who never used Flash/AIR), fixing bugs, and improving cross-platform consistency should be the biggest priorities for OpenFL’s future. What’s there today is a really solid foundation, which just needs a little love to truly shine. Unfortunately, the places where OpenFL/Lime needs the most love now isn’t the cool/fun architecture stuff. It’s kind of work where you roll up your sleeves, crawl around in tight spaces, and get a little dirty.