Hi! On Mon, May 06, 2002 at 09:42:24PM +0200, Petr Stehlik wrote: > I know what you mean. I guess this doesn't help you but I am a > lousy coder and I feel shame whenever I release my own code. But > I do it nevertheless 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. > forcing them to write a new desktop from scratch - which, in the > end, is probably same as quiting the platform immediately > (considering the amount of work that has to go into a good > desktop like Thing currently is). 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. Just an example: For drag&drop of icons, Thing has three different functions (one for dragging desktop icons, one for group icons, and one for desktop icons), even though most of their code is actually the same. Thus, for adding something like popup folders, I'd either have to add the code to all three functions, which is inefficient, or - better - redesign the drag&drop code to use only one function to handle all three cases. And that's the tricky thing, because it would influence so many parts of the code that the work required could easily be more difficult / time expensive than to write something from scratch. > The key question is whether you have > time/energy/inspiration/motivation for further work on Thing. Is > it getting close to 1.30 yet? 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. Ciao Thomas -- Thomas Binder (Gryf @ IRCNet) gryf@hrzpub.tu-darmstadt.de PGP-key available on request! Vote against SPAM: http://www.politik-digital.de/spam/
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