Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 20:43:39 -0500 From: "G. Adam Stanislav" <zen@buddhist.com> To: "Pedro F. Giffuni" <pfgiffun@bachue.usc.unal.edu.co> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Applications Message-ID: <3.0.6.32.19990416204339.00924d30@mail.bfm.org> In-Reply-To: <3717CC38.4CF1B824@bachue.usc.unal.edu.co> References: <199904160601.XAA88836@rah.star-gate.com> <19990415224102.A47059@ontario.mooseriver.com> <199904160601.XAA88836@rah.star-gate.com> <3.0.6.32.19990416161503.0092d260@mail.bfm.org>
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At 18:48 16-04-1999 -0500, Pedro F. Giffuni wrote: >FWIW; > >I have had good success having my ports committed for a good reason: my ports >usually cover a need that many people share. Everyone, for example, wants to be >able to use their ghostscript fonts on X. You mean you can release fonts as ports? I have designed quite a few PostScript fonts some time ago (not lately, though), so that is something I am quite interested in. All of the fonts were hand coded (I wrote a font compiler and a font disassembler for that purpose, although right now it is on an old computer which currently I cannot take things from). >I understand committers are also >volunteers and I don't have any particular interest in pushing them to do >something about my ports, but the applications that get committed earlier somehow >represent general interest of the community. Oh, I certainly do not mean to push. I would have never mentioned it, except someone was asking why developers do not write as much software for FreeBSD as they do for Linux. It occured to me that one of the reasons might be the way we distribute software via ports. The system, naturally, takes longer than something like freshmeat. That does not mean I do not like the system: It has many advantages, and those outweigh the disadvantages (IMHO). The biggest advantage of the ports system is that it makes us think twice about releasing software before being reasonably sure that it works right. On freshmeat I have sometimes seen several versions of the same program released on the same day. Of course, to many Linux users that is probably an advantage, simply because they subscribe to a different philosophy: They often quote proudly that when they release a piece of software they receive bug fixes from all over the world within minutes. I personally prefer to torture my programs before I release them and work out the bugs myself. As I said, it is different philosophy. I am probably much older than the average Linux programmer (will be 49 in a week), so I do prefer the FreeBSD way. (Differences are good, as far as I am concerned.) > I sometimes look at freshmeat >myself, but there also so much junk coming in, that I thank we don't carry all >that bloat in the, already tight, CDs. Hehe. You could probably fill a different CD every week if you wanted to publish everything from freshmeat on it. I will not comment on much of it being junk because I choose never to decide what is junk and what is not when it comes to programming. Although I will admit that I was taught a completely different way of programming 30+ years ago than I see today. Our teacher beat it into our heads (and we were impressionable high schoolers) that after we write a program, we must go through it line by line and find the one line we can cut out. After that, we must go through the program line by line and find the one line we can cut out, and so on, until, theoretically we end up with one line of code (we were also assured that would never happen). I still work like that -- and mostly in assembly language. Some of my projects take years to finish. Sometimes, after working on a program for months, I throw it away and rewrite it from scratch. For example, I have been working on a video special effects generator since 1996. I wrote it in C++ at first - the first and last thing I did in that language (after I compiled it to assembly language and saw the overhead, I screamed). I then rewrote it in assembly language, several times, made it into a Windows DLL which I never released. Now I am rewriting it, from scratch, for FreeBSD, and will probably eventually submit it as a port. >I suggest that you submit the port for the utility and reference the PR number of >the library for it in the new PR. No one is interested in committing a library >unless it's used for something, and there are many non-committers that like to >test the "fresh" ports. There are one or two libraries that I submitted sometime >ago in order to build an Rlab port: nowadays I have no interest in porting Rlab, >but if I had sent the complete Rlab port, it would have probably been committed. OK, how? I prefer releasing the libraries separately from my programs so if someone wants to write a better program that uses the libraries (I am much better at libraries than at the programs that use them), I don't want them to have to list my program as a dependency, only the library. >OTOH, if the port builds and work correctly don't expect much feedback :-). Not immediately perhaps. But sometimes people ask you years later if you are the guy who wrote such and such thing. I created the Avatar console protocol for Opus BBS over a decade ago, wrote a DOS device driver for it, a language and a compiler, and things like that, all in assembly language. I received very little feedback at the time. I kept a very low profile for many years since, and now that I started getting active in FreeBSD lists, I started receiving messages from people asking me if I was the creator of Avatar and thanking me for it and how good it was. It was quite a surprise: I thought no one would ever remember (I mean, a decade in computer history is ancient, besides, while it was an improvement, it was nothing earth shaking) -- I'd probably have continued my low profile had I known this was going to happen. :-) Still, it's kinda neat - it makes one realize we programmers make more difference than we admit to ourselves (especially when one is "old" and remembers the days before computers, when chip was a piece of wood, hehehe). Adam P.S. Anything I post here should be read with an implied "IMHO" at the start of every sentence - I guess it does not hurt to state that explicitly every so often. --- Want to design your own web counter? Get GCL 2.10 from http://www.whizkidtech.net/gcl/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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