Re: Fox toolkit future?

Good Afternoon Robert,

"github is where hackers go" especially those who never went to college. 
Agile is not Software Engineering nor does it exist in the same galaxy 
as Software Engineering.

But . . . you are welcome to your opinion, I must respectfully disagree.

I guess it really boils down to "who" the creator of this project wants 
to attract to assist with development.

Nobody? then status quo is fine I can totally understand wanting one 
single vision for a project. It just won't live on when you hit life's 
great checkout counter.

Developers who went to college for software development and have a lot 
of years? SourceForge

Kids writing their first programs after glancing at a tutorial? GitHub 
or Gitlab

Yes, there are a token few old timers going to the Git world, but when 
you look at the majority of "eyes" going there it is green developers 
without college educations for software development. Most have less than 
two years under their belt and are "eager to prove themselves." 
Everybody gotta start somewhere, but adding green developers to any 
project creates a serious hand holding burden.

I assume the creator of this library has an occupation requiring a not 
insignificant amount of their time so they can afford to both eat and 
live indoors. I also assume that this UI library has been released and 
maintained out of the goodness of their heart and some personal need for 
it that they have.

Given both of those assumptions I can totally understand if they don't 
want to bring in other developers or park the source in an on-line 
version control system.

--

Since when can you not fork a project on SourceForge? I did it recently 
with Scintilla.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/csscintilla/

There is an ocean of dead projects on github too. Just open the Brave 
browser and search

dead github projects

then scroll through the seemingly endless pages of "project dead?" 
questions about projects that haven't been updated in years.

Umm, you can see your forks too

https://sourceforge.net/p/scintilla/code/ci/default/tree/

There are 33 forks of Scintilla showing in the Mercurial page for that 
project.

XML Copy Editor has 4 forks according to the code page.

https://sourceforge.net/p/xml-copy-editor/code/ci/master/tree/

they are here

https://sourceforge.net/p/xml-copy-editor/code/forks/

At any rate, there are an increasing number of binary only "projects" on 
SourceForge as of late. I do find that annoying.

No, you didn't sound grip-y at all. Hopefully I don't either. It is 
Friday and I still have stuff to get done, but I don't mean to sound 
grip-y or up-ity. Just been on too many paid projects that pulled 
"talent" in from Github. We did __not__ get the A-Team, B-Team, or C-Team.

On 6/23/23 16:00, Robert Butler wrote:
> Good afternoon all,
>
> I respectfully disagree with "/github is where hackers go/" -- github 
> or even gitlab have MARKEDLY better-- day and night-- support for 
> issue tracking, CI, even basic usability issues such as front-end design.
>
> Github is where the majority of eyeballs are, like it or not. 
> Sourceforge has become more of a niche hobbyist site. There's dozens 
> of dead projects on sourceforge. And if you want to take up a fork of 
> a project, just go and fork it. You can't do that on SourceForge. Sure 
> it has legacy and significance as being the forebearer of open source 
> project hosting, but very few people use it, compared to sites like 
> github.
>
> That being said, I'm 100% NOT advocating for migrating to github. Even 
> self-hosting gitlab would be a much better improvement over the 
> confusing UI/UX that are project pages.
>
> And if you want to assume a site on Sourceforge? You have to get 
> approval. You COULD go and just clone the code, but it's much extra 
> unnecessary effort. Besides you can't see a list of forks which others 
> have which perhaps improve upon your own. You could even use Bitbucket 
> if you want a professionally run outfit.
>
> Just my two cents.
> Apologies if this sounded gripe-y, I didn't mean for it to.
>
> Thank you!
> Robert
>
> On Fri, Jun 23, 2023 at 4:46 PM Roland Hughes via Foxgui-users 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>     All,
>
>     1) Personally I would recommend SourceForge to host. The Git
>     family of sites is where hackers go. If you want to be serious for
>     a niche you use SourceForge. This is where Scintilla and many
>     other serious projects get hosted. Some even choose to use
>     Mercurial on there so only professionally trained developers can
>     assist, but that is a different conversation.
>
>     3) CMake. This is what CopperSpice moved to years ago along with
>     many other products/projects. Qt currently has a very crippled
>     move towards it. They might not even succeed.
>
>     2) Please forgive me if this next is misinformation due to my not
>     having looked at the project for a while, but here is what I
>     personally believe should be in a new stable release, perhaps 2.0
>
>     * Full Wayland/Westin native, not via the built in X11 stuff that
>     is going away.
>
>     * IMX8 support (NXP nuked all X11 support here) IMX6 and lower
>     numbers still have X11 support
>
>     * efficient line and bar graph classes. By efficient I mean the
>     data store can be much larger than what is displayed yet the class
>     quickly graphs what can be displayed. Also has concept of a "live"
>     graph where, for bar/stack graph the bars move up and down based
>     on currently assigned value and for line (or circle) datapoints
>     get added to the end. In case of line some datapoints will
>     eventually fall off the beginning so the "live" data can still be
>     graphed. For the line "live" concept, think of a heart monitor
>     like this
>
>     https://codialist.de/sites/default/files/styles/col_12_s/public/2020-04/programmierung_user_interface-legacy_code.png?itok=udKd7Olg
>
>     or this
>
>     https://www.medicaldevice-network.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2019/05/Boston-UX-Device-Image-credit-Boston-UX-e1556706990389.png
>
>     * Themes - I know the "Approach" manifest champions "Identical
>     looks" but we really need a break from the Windows 95/Motif look
>     and feel. Don't get me wrong, it's functional, but even in the
>     medical device embedded systems market we are getting pushed to
>     create UI that look like these:
>
>     https://camo.githubusercontent.com/f0fdf84e89f010fcfba190f1a327e0f86d15d24f62006bf69ddc21e126d60cc2/68747470733a2f2f63796366692e6769746875622e696f2f6173736574732f696d672f656c656d656e74732f70686f746f6e5f73616d706c65722e6a7067
>
>     I actually helped create this device, we had to use Qt 4.8 OpenSource
>
>     https://image.tigermedical.com/Products/LargeImages/WEL71XX-B-.jpg
>
>     Everything is a custom widget. If you look at the screen shots in
>     the user manual for the Connex Spot Monitor, that UI is a thing of
>     beauty. All without a GPU
>
>     https://t4.ftcdn.net/jpg/04/03/32/01/360_F_403320195_XA6SovF6KtnAzOCUjNUuVc5Q4JZLbrwz.webp
>
>     I actually worked on this device
>
>     https://www.kneevoice.com
>
>     and we had to use Elements UI because we couldn't figure out in a
>     reasonable amount of time how to make an interface that looked
>     like that using Fox. Trust me, I was the one person finding and
>     evaluating which OpenSource GUI toolkit to use. In the FDA
>     regulated world being able to run static source analysis on your
>     entire code base is a big win, especially if you can lock that
>     code down somewhere.
>
>     We used to get away with sucky UI that looked like this
>
>     https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21543719/ows_155318959567868.jpg
>
>     but not anymore.
>
>     Just my 0.0002 cents
>
>     On 6/23/23 14:02, Devin Smith wrote:
>>     Hi Jeroen,
>>
>>     Partially this message is based on the recent question that Pablo
>>     Alvarez Lopez asked about new stable versions of the toolkit but
>>     there are some other questions that I (and possibly others) have.
>>
>>     1. What are your plans with moving forward with some public git
>>     repository? Obviously there are Github and Gitlab but you're also
>>     more than welcome to host a git repo directly on fox-toolkit.org
>>     <http://fox-toolkit.org> if you'd feel more comfortable with
>>     that. I really think this could help with further adoption and
>>     even new feature development. Both Github and Gitlab also offer
>>     CI as well.
>>
>>     2. The stable version (1.6.57) was released in 2018 and many
>>     enhancements have been made in the 1.7.x series. It would be a
>>     great idea to release a 1.8.x stable version. What are your
>>     thoughts on a new stable release?
>>
>>     3. How about moving away from GNU autotools? Moving to CMake or
>>     Meson (or something else?) may relieve you of having to maintain
>>     Visual Studio solution files. There are already unofficial
>>     versions of the toolkit using different build systems.
>>
>>     Making the move to a public Git and/or releasing a new stable
>>     version may drive the project further forward and offer a chance
>>     for new contributors to participate with FOX as well. Not doing
>>     these things may harm the reputation of the project and indicate
>>     that it is forever a "legacy" project. Many of us enjoy using
>>     this toolkit and see advantages of continuing to use it over more
>>     popular toolkits.
>>
>>     Thanks in advance,
>>
>>     Devin Smith
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     _______________________________________________
>>     Foxgui-users mailing list
>>     [email protected]
>>     https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/foxgui-users
>
>     -- 
>     Roland Hughes, President
>     Logikal Solutions
>     (630)-205-1593
>
>     http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com
>     http://www.infiniteexposure.net
>     http://www.johnsmith-book.com
>     http://www.logikalblog.com
>     http://www.interestingauthors.com/blog
>
>     _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
> -- 
> *-*
> Robert Butler
> *r-butler.net <http://r-butler.net>*
>
>
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-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com
http://www.infiniteexposure.net
http://www.johnsmith-book.com
http://www.logikalblog.com
http://www.interestingauthors.com/blog

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