Re: Another patch

Gabor Z. Papp ([email protected]) wrote:
: [email protected] wrote:

: | : So summary there are 2 diffs after 0.3.1?
: | 
: | Basically yes.

: Are you waiting for other problems?
: What is your plan; publishing a new release?
: What is with readonly cvs access? You wrote, that you can do
: something. :)

I put up 0.3.2 on sunsite this evening.  No, I wasn't waiting on
other problems, I've had to go out and do money-work.  Not sure what
I meant by readonly cvs access, but the code changes so slowly now
that I doubt cvs will be useful to anyone.

I mentioned this list in the 0.3.2 README.  Maybe I'll get some
ideas, I know some folks are getting a bit impatient (maybe no one
in present company).  Basically, I'm no longer very happy with the
sn code.  Features have crept in that are rarely used, yet they must
be maintained in future revisions.  This sucks.  I don't want to
work on it much because of this, and I don't want to pass it to
someone else either, because then -he- will have to deal with
backward compatibility.

For instance, someone was asking about article filtering.  This isn't
very hard to add, but to add it it has to go on top of a bunch of
old code and add another config file, thereby creating another
layer on top of which the next developer must work.  Periodically I
think it is necessary to rewrite whole chunks of the code if only
to maintain source hygiene.  This occurred in 0.2.5/0.3.0 but it
didn't sanitize everything.  The layout and semantics of the
various dot-files were not changed.  I feel the time has arrived
again and I'm not sure how best to proceed, especially since
everything still basically works <g>

Lately I've been toying with the idea of making programs that are
wholly interpreted.  This does away with the sanctity of source.
Then I won't have to bother with cvs any more.  I was looking at
a Forth as the language, which has an obscenely small footprint
and is fast, but has the disadvantage that not many people know it
(including me), and it isn't type safe.

Anyway, that was the "state of sn" spiel, for the folks who were
wondering what's not going on.

-harold