Re: refactoring

Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> 
> What plans do you have for the distribution of your work ?

Once it reaches reasonable levels of safety, maturity, and utility, I
would definitely like others to be able to use it -- and contribute to
it if they wish. I don't know yet just where those levels are, but
basically I'm thinking like this:

     safety -- make it pretty unlikely to mess up the source code it
     modifies, including certain "undo" capabilities.

     maturity -- get rid of various coding hacks and design kludges,
     so I won't be embarrassed when other people see my work.

     utility -- put in enough functionality for it to be fairly useful
     right out of the box, even if it's still lacking many features.

I presume that list won't surprise anybody...

As far as I'm concerned, the more freely available it becomes, the
better. I don't know much about the different kinds of open source
licenses, but I gather that not everyone agrees on which license is best
in each case. For example, on the Opencxx-users list I've seen various
messages from Grzegorz Jakacki about that. (I don't know what history
lies behind his postings, and as I said I don't know much about
licensing. Still, my initial impression is that he doesn't seem to be a
happy person.)

I'm sure some of the details would have to be coordinated with my
company, but I know some of our other people are releasing their
software as open source. I wouldn't think there'd be any serious
problems with my software.

> Any chance we could fold it back into synopsis itself ?

I don't see why not. However, it might make more sense as a companion to
Synopsis or perhaps an add-on. Synopsis is pretty useful for a lot of
different tasks, and my program is just one of the many things that can
be built on top of it. But whether it becomes part of Synopsis or part
of a set of Synopsis add-ons, distributing and maintaining it from the
Synopsis site sounds okay to me.

> Part of this interest comes from me anticipating changes in the 
> various Synopsis APIs, and so having that code relatively close would
> help maintaining it.

That makes sense. And I'm glad you're interested. Once I can bring it up
to a reasonable level, I'm all in favor of wide distribution. I'm still
hoping to reach that point within a couple of months, but a lot depends
on the rest of my work load. And of course, if one of the groups around
here comes up with some development money, that'll be even better. :-)

Rick
-- 
Richard M Kelly                             [email protected]
[PGP  =>  D5 C3 CC D2 B7 D0 A9 B0  D5 90 B2 55 5A 80 23 B6  FC AB 67 B4]