Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2002 09:34:19 -0500 From: Antoine Beaupre <anarcat@anarcat.ath.cx> To: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) Cc: freebsd-libh@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: libh learning curve, etc. Message-ID: <370BA4FE-48A2-11D6-945B-0050E4A0BB3F@anarcat.ath.cx> In-Reply-To: <qqu1qq3ens.1qq@localhost.localdomain>
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Le Vendredi 5 avril 2002, à 12:20 , Gary W. Swearingen a écrit : > Your project seems very important and I thought I'd investigate to see > if I wanted to try to help out. Welcome to the crowd of bystanders. :) > But ya'll sure haven't done much to encourage people to help. (And if > you do want to discourage people, you ought to be up front about it so > people don't waste time finding out the hard way.) If you ever worked on a already-started project, you would know that it's much harder to document and promote code that's already written. > I say that for these reasons, mostly having to do with the web page at > http://www.freebsd.org/projects/libh.html: > > -- There are no requirements, specifications, or design documents, etc, > other than the old JKH memo, so one expects to have to Read the Source, > but nowhere does it say how to find it short of CVS which I (and many > others) don't know how to run beyond cvsupping the main repo. The port should make use of CVS a bit easier, but see below. I think it might be a good idea to put a tarball of a port snapshot on the website thought. Alex, Jordan, comments? > -- The port doesn't work (maybe because my ports are a month old). I > see that this password problem was reported a couple of weeks ago. I'm sorry about that. The port's been broken for a while. There's been CVS repo-damage done that inhibited any cvs checkout of the release/console directory. This has been fixed. I've been having problems making a full libh build yesterday because of header file problems in tvision. I'll take a look at it this weekend or next week. In the mean time, you should be able to build the source and build libh without TVision. > -- The CVSWEB tool at freebsd.org has only a few, uninteresting libh > files. That's because libh is not part of the main freebsd CVS repository. > -- The mailing list archives are mostly mind-numbing commit messages. *That's* not constructive. > You probably ought to look at some other Project home pages and borrow > a few ideas. Yeah, i know. The idea I got from Some Other Project was to: 1- get sponsorship 2- get people to work on libh The problem with [1] is that noone seems to be interested in sponsoring a tool so unimportant (!). And the problem with [2] is that we need to work on documentation and design documents, and to get there, we need [2]. > I'll probably try the port occasionally and take a look, but as > important as I feel your project is, I can't get very enthusiastic for a > project which uses QPL/LGPL libraries, Apart from saying that you won't get any work done on FreeBSD with this attitude (eg. gcc gdb), I won't get into this. > TVision with no apparent license > (a disclaimer is all I could find), and TCL which few care to > learn. Feel free to rewrite libh with a BSD-licensed console and graphical library. As for TCL, "It's Just Another Language". > But then I'm a C/C++ beginner so you wouldn't get much out of me > anyway, beyond some documentation and test reports. You know, this is exactly what we need. And if you really read the mailing lists archive, you'll see this is not the first time I answer this kind of mail by saying: Read The Source, yes. We need documentation, and the only way to do that is to Read The Source and Test The Code. > I'll probably > stick with the -doc project and my own programming exercises. > > I hope you'll take this as constructive critism; it wasn't meant to hurt > feelings, though it probably will. There was some good criticism, but I'm getting tired of seeing people just pass by the page and say: "Hey, this looks like it needs some help, let's complain to -libh@!". Yes the code is under-documented, yes, we need some solid design documents. Thank you for reminding us. I hope you'll take this as constructive criticism; it wasn't meant to hurt feelings though it probably will. Maybe I'm just ranting and I should shut up as I had the same reaction as you the first time I got interested in libh. A. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-libh" in the body of the messagehelp
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