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, =E0 12:20 , Gary W. Swearingen a =E9crit : > 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=20 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=20= 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=20= CVS repo-damage done that inhibited any cvs checkout of the=20 release/console directory. This has been fixed. I've been having problems making a full libh build yesterday because of=20= 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=20= 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=20= a tool so unimportant (!). And the problem with [2] is that we need to=20= work on documentation and design documents, and to get there, we need=20 [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=20= 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=20 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=20 mailing lists archive, you'll see this is not the first time I answer=20 this kind of mail by saying: Read The Source, yes. We need=20 documentation, and the only way to do that is to Read The Source and=20 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=20 just pass by the page and say: "Hey, this looks like it needs some help,=20= let's complain to -libh@!". Yes the code is under-documented, yes, we=20= need some solid design documents. Thank you for reminding us. I hope you'll take this as constructive criticism; it wasn't meant to=20 hurt feelings though it probably will. Maybe I'm just ranting and I should shut up as I had the same reaction=20= 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 message
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