Re: [MiNT] Thing bug - is Gryf listening here?

[Petr Stehlik <joy@sophics.cz>]

On Tue, 2002-05-07 at 11:02, Thomas Binder wrote:
> Well, another quite serious problem is that Thing is not (c) by
> me, only some small parts. Most work was done by Arno Welzel, whom
> I'd have to ask for permission. And my last attempts to contact
> him (though some years ago) failed - I got no reply on mails and
> he also didn't answer the phone.
> 
> Furthermore, it's quite tricky to decide which parts of Thing's
> code must not be made open source because it's unknown who
> actually wrote them and which license they follow. Not to mention
> parts of the code that are closed source anyway, i.e. which I only
> have .o files of.

Hmm, this sounds bad. Though I can hardly imagine that the original
authors would mind if you open sourced it.

> Well, believe me: Thing's architecture doesn't allow for major
> improvements - too many static structures and arrays, redudant
> code all over the place, etc. In fact, some things I'd like to do
> would require redesigning large parts of the code, having so many
> side effects that it was actually easier to rewrite Thing from
> scratch.

The example of drag&drop code really scared me. So how about using Thing
just as a valuable resource of ideas for writing a new desktop from
scratch?
 
> I'm currently not very busy working on it. One important thing
> that still needs to be done is adding code for scrollable edit
> fields, to complete the support for filenames with more than 32
> characters. And that's definetely a "must" feature for the new
> release.

That wouldn't be too hard to implement. And if the code was open
somebody would have already written it for you, I believe.

Petr