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



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
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