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amagnasco / xwpe

Upload of an abandoned ncurses-based programming environment
http://www.identicalsoftware.com/xwpe/
GNU General Public License v2.0
31 stars 7 forks source link

Need some communication #90

Open gbonnema opened 6 years ago

gbonnema commented 6 years ago

Allessandro,

I think we need some communication. I have restarted my efforts to improve the code, but I run into several issues where we need to make a decision.

  1. Community.
  2. ncurses vs no ncurses
  3. X vs no X
  4. abbreviations

ad 1 Community. We have no idea who the community consists of, if people use our code or copy it and change it themselves. we have no idea about the hardware they run on, the software environment they have and the limitations that software and hardware imply. This makes deciding to continue support for stuff more difficult or impossible. ad 2. ncurses or no ncurses. The code is littered with #ifdefs that makes reading and interpreting pretty hard. We need to know whether we want to continue support for XWPE without ncurses or not. ad 3. X vs no X The code is littered with #ifdefs for X vs non X. Even in combination with ncurses or no ncurses. It makes interpreting correctness all but impossible. Let alone testing. ad 4. abbreviations. To add injury to insult, some of the abbreviations and methods of abbreviations make the code hard to read or to interpret.

If I were alone in this, I would drop support for no ncurses and keep X or no X. Reason is that ncurses is practically always available en people always switch between pure text and XWindows text. That would eliminate a lot of code that complicates matters. The only remaing #ifdef would be X or no X. So I feel we need to talk.

EDIT1: if we clearly specify for what platforms we write the editor and which packages we require should improve chances of having people use the software or getting our version into the current Linux distributions.

amagnasco commented 1 year ago

Hi! Five years after you published this, I am seeing this message for the first time, and neither of us have been on here for years, so you have a point about the community... I honestly just wanted to say thank you for all the work you put in on this! And yes, absolutely agree on all of these changes.

gbonnema commented 1 year ago

Hey Alessandro,

In the meantime I have retired and I no longer do any programming. This is unfortunately the state of affairs for many free software projects. Luckily, many free software projects succeed, so it is like the biblical seed that either falls on rock or on fertile ground, except that with free software someone can always pick up the pace and restart the effort.

I apologize for not continuing, kind regards, Guus.

amagnasco commented 1 year ago

Best of luck Guus, enjoy your retirement!!

On Mon, Mar 6, 2023, 09:16 Guus @.***> wrote:

Hey Alessandro,

In the meantime I have retired and I no longer do any programming. This is unfortunately the state of affairs for many free software projects. Luckily, many free software projects succeed, so it is like the biblical seed that either falls on rock or on fertile ground, except that with free software someone can always pick up the pace and restart the effort.

I apologize for not continuing, kind regards, Guus.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/amagnasco/xwpe/issues/90#issuecomment-1456216834, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ADJFXLC2O7LMSAB5TUZW2N3W2XWSTANCNFSM4ERI2BUA . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.***>