Re: Spotted on Freshmeat: Squirrel Shell

Didn't you forget the standard open source sentence "Release early release
often"?
It is probably a very early release and you should have wrote this to the
developers (without your last paragraph about them not understanding
software quality.
Also regarding the English errors in the manual, you should have pointed
them to the errors or maybe fixing them and sending the fixed manual.

-- 
Ori Idan


On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 11:37 PM, Shlomi Fish <[email protected]> wrote:

>   Hi all!
>
> I recently spotted a new shell called Squirrel Shell on Freshmeat.net:
>
> http://squirrelsh.sourceforge.net/
>
> Here is my impression from it:
>
> 1. Doing the ./configure --prefix ; make ; make install dance caused the
> "make
> install" stage to fail with weird installation errors. Borrowing from the
> debian/ directory there, I added --with-mime=no which
> disabled ./configure-mime (which can only handle absolute system pathnames)
>
> from running and as a result, it was sucessful.
>
> 2. Here's what happened in my first run of squirrelsh:
>
> {{{{{{
> $ ~/apps/squirrelsh/bin/squirrelsh
> > ls
> ERROR: the index 'ls' does not exist
> > help
> ERROR: the index 'help' does not exist
> > h
> ERROR: the index 'h' does not exist
> > man ls
> SQUIRREL ERROR: Line 1, Col 6: end of statement expected (; or lf)
> > run("ls")
> apps Backup Choices Desktop Download Music TEMP Videos
> Arcs bin conf Docs dwhelper progs tmp
> > help()
> ERROR: the index 'help' does not exist
> >
> }}}}}}
>
> In short - not very usable. Plus, the prompts do not support readline-like
> editing.
>
> 3. The man page ( nroff -man ~/apps/squirrelsh/share/man/man1/squirrelsh.1
> |
> less -isrr ) is very short, and just refers one to the two .pdf's in the
> install directory (indicated by a "<b>install_dir</b>" string in the output
> -
> the full path is not given), which naturally, I had little patience to
> read.
>
> 4. The homepage gives several examples:
>
> http://squirrelsh.sourceforge.net/
>
> Whereas in bash running "ls" is simply q{ls}, in squirrelsh it is
> q{run("ls")}, but it gets better:
>
> {{{{
> #!/usr/bin/squirrelsh
> // Work with command line parameters
> run("foo", [ __argv[1], __argv[2] ]);
> }}}}
>
> Which is the equivalent for "foo $1 $2" in bash.
>
> The example for matrix multiplication is shorter in squirrelsh, but it is a
>
> bit contrived, given that I'd use Perl or whatever for anything of that
> complexity.
>
> 5. There are many English errors in the documentation:
>
> * "It is based on Squirrel scripting language which has these features: "
>
> * "Cross-platform nature of Squirrel Shell lets users write one script and
> use
> it everywhere"
>
> * "Actual location of the files depends on installation method."
>
> * "It is based on powerful general-purpose scripting language "Squirrel".
>
> -----------------
>
> In short, I was heavily disappointed from squirrelsh. It doesn't look like
> a
> usable shell. Seems like more developers who don't understand software
> quality enough:
>
> http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/high-quality-software/
>
> Regards,
>
> Shlomi Fish
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
> Stop Using MSIE - http://www.shlomifish.org/no-ie/
>
> Shlomi, so what are you working on? Working on a new wiki about unit
> testing
> fortunes in freecell? -- Ran Eilam
>  
>



-- 
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