Re: Recap

On Fri, 26 Aug 2005, Gregory A Lundberg wrote:

> 1) I am back.
>
> What that means, if anything, is yet to be determined but, please,
> "don't hassle the crazy guy", at least too much :P

Gregory thanks for being so open about where you're at.  I had been
wondering what had happened to what I had found to otherwise be a rather
active development team.

> Unfortunately the mailing list archives are vastly out of date.

I've put up what I have (I'm not the one you were thinking of who said
he has most of the traffic since 1999 but needs to clean out personal
messages;  what I have starts in August 2001, doesn't yet include any
of this month's traffic, and is likely very incomplete after the mailing
list was split off) at http://alcor.concordia.ca/~syl/wu-ftpd/

Feel free to use what you can from it.

> My feelings on Version 3 are that it should:
> ...
>   * support win32 (2000, XP Home and Pro, and, eventually,  Longhorn).
>     There has been some objection to supporting Windows.  This is an
>     open issue.

I think if there's developper interest, those who are interested in it
should certainly go ahead and work on it.  My own reaction to it is "why
would anyone want to setup an FTP server on Windows," but I don't expect
that this is a popular reaction.

I certainly would be concerned about how this would affect Unix versions
of the code base, but you've already indicated that you'd like to see it
be very modular, so if done right, the effect should be minimal if
visible at all.

>   * have a GUI.  I suggest Qt because of market share.  ... There has
>     been little discussion on this other than some agreement that a
>     GUI is needed.

I'm assuming that you mean this to be a GUI interface to the
configuration files?  If so, the only request I would make of it is that
it not result in configuration files that can't be otherwise editted in
the "normal" fashion.

I would question whether a GUI is actually needed, but I don't feel it's
my place to resist work others want to do.

>   * use XML for the internal configuration file formats.

I'm not sure I agree with that, though it likely would result in a
configuration that's easily front-ended with a GUI and still satisfies
my request above, so I would have very little to base any objection on
(other than I've worked very little with XML and don't feel comfortable
with it ...  does that even count?)

> 4) I think patches, bug reports, feature requests and improvements
> from the past few years should go into the Version 2 code base,
> possibly leading to version 2.7.0.

I definitely would be interested in participating at this level.  I'm
not really a programmer, not very comfortable with object-oriented
programming, and have no formal experience with C++ (except perhaps
small amounts of troubleshooting done for work), so I'm not sure I would
be able to contribute all that much to the version 3 code base, if it
goes in that direction.

Still, if I can contribute to closing off the version 2 stuff, and even
a little to version 3, I'll certainly want to do what I can.

> 6) I would very much like to have a "conference" or "convention" for
>    wu-ftpd.

If it happens, I'd very much like to attend.  My employer might even be
willing to send me, but even if they don't I'll certainly try and see
what I can do to get there.

-- 
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Sylvain Robitaille                              [email protected]

Systems analyst                                   Concordia University
Instructional & Information Technology        Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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