nanogui: Re: What needs doing on Nano-X: harsh comments
Subject:
RE: What needs doing on Nano-X: harsh comments
From:
Alex Holden ####@####.####
Date:
18 May 1999 12:29:51 -0000
Message-Id: <Pine.LNX.4.04.9905181254290.384-100000@hyperspace>
On Mon, 17 May 1999, Greg Haerr wrote:
> Geez, bit-rot? Let's see, I've been working contributing like
> hell to this project and now it's rotting? When I started working on
I'm sorry that you seem to have taken my comments as a personal insult; I
didn't mean it that way at all. I would define bit-rot as good code which
has become broken because it hasn't been updated when things change around
it. There seem to be several areas in Nano-X which have been affected by
this because you've been working so fast at implementing new things.
> this project, two weeks and 75 hours ago, v0.1 didn't run any mini-x
> programs. The entire purpose of all my work has been to get nanoX running,
I knew that when I released it, I was just too busy to do anything about
it. I have some more time to spare now, so I'll be taking a more active
role (including carefully examining and testing patches before I include
them).
> In the mean time, I thought I caught nanoGui's stated mission, that what
> we were after was a small graphics windowing system that could be used
> for a *variety* of uses, not just running on linux.
Actually, I wasn't bothered about that at all myself. Where did I state
that? I think it would be great if it could be ported to non-Linux
platforms, as long as it doesn't suffer in general as a result.
> A single "typedef SCREENINFO GR_SCREEN_INFO;" is all that's needed
> to completely solve all this, and that was to be coming, except now
The point was that I don't see any reason to move away from mini-x's
naming convention of prefixing names with the layer that they belong to.
> I'm really glad you found some more mini-x programs that we can run. I'm happy
> to get them running. I didn't realize we need to get them running without
> any modifications to them, even at v0.4.
I never said that we did.
> Give me one day and I'll fix it up so you like it. This makes
> it harder during development to see what's changed and thus control bugs, though.
I don't see why. You mean you prefer to write code in a different style to
what is already there so that you can see that it is new?
> I thought the idea of doing a quick real-mode port of nanoX to
> a 16-bit compiler served the community well. There are many folks on the ELKS
> list that would like to see this project run on ELKS. I found it quicker
> to write all the 16-bit code on DOS, which also runs in real mode. Do we
> really care about filenames or are we trying to build a graphics engine that
> runs on multiple platforms? I pick the multiple platforms. BTW, I hate
> 8.3 filenames also.
I only said that I didn't like the fact that the filenames aren't very
descriptive, not that I thought doing a 16 bit port was bad. It's very
easily fixed (either by writing descriptive names which have at least 8
unique characters on the front, or by splitting things into directories
like I mentioned earlier, which is probably a good idea anyway).
> Sorry about the tone of this email, Alex, but my efforts haven't been called bit-rot
> in quite a while, and I'm just not used to it.
I think you just misunderstood what I meant by it.
--------------- Linux- the choice of a GNU generation. --------------
: Alex Holden (M1CJD)- Caver, Programmer, Land Rover nut, Radio Ham :
-------------------- http://www.linuxhacker.org/ --------------------
