Mail Archives: geda-user/2016/07/23/05:47:22
On Sat, 23 Jul 2016, Vladimir Zhbanov (vzhbanov AT gmail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
> If the alternative you are trying to offer is C, you're off the
> point. It is already in, and it adds nothing. See, my recently
> done contributions are mostly done in Scheme. While the code there
> is not touching the C code we have, it does some attractive work
> (I hope).
Nope.
The alternative I try to offer is a core implementation in plain C _and_
user extensibility through multiple scripting languages. My offer is that
the core is compilable and executable on a wide range of systems without
largish dependencies that are often hassle to get to work. My offer is
that the end user doesn't need to learn scheme or awk or python to create
a new menu if he already happens to know one of the ~10 languages gpmi
supports.
>
> If you're writing about Python or some other interpreted language,
> I should say that I feel it is non-pragmatic to `rewrite it all'
> as some people offer. I see there is not enough contributions for
> every language people are suggesting for our project. Basically,
> we have one Scheme contributor (me), one Python contributor
> (Roland) and one C glib/gtk contributor (Edward), though I'm
> trying to work on the glib/C part too. Peter Brett and Peter
A major point in my reasoning that is being missed here: I strongly
believe in separating core functionality and user scripting.
Core is written in the language the most active contributors/main
developers chose. To the end user this language matters very little. To
potential contributors it does matter a lot, tho: languages more
widespread and more popular pose less burden to new joiners.
Users should be able to chose from a wider set of languages. If they can
do so, it's more likely they start scripting to solve their problems which
in turn may result in more user contribution. On that side, there should
be no preferred language or arbitrary limitations.
> Clifton, who both did an immence amount of work before, are now
> busy with other things, so they cannot help much. Anyway, I don't
> want to discourage Roland or Edward. Therefore I do most of my
> work in Scheme trying to not touch the C code they rely on. Now, I
> like Scheme very much, though I can say, if it all is written in
> Python, I would continue to work on it (I believe).
It is reasonable to chose language according to the _current_ situation,
the current number of contributors and langauge spectrum if you want to
conserve the current state.
I do not want to. Thus in cschem I take another direction.
This does not do anything bad to gschem or geda. If I didn't consider
working on cschem, I sure wouldn't be contributing to gschem, so nothing
is lost.
>>
>> I believe having alternatives does not subtract but add. Don't assume that
>> the time some of those "my way" guys would have been spent on "your way"
>> automatically if the given person didn't invest it in an alternative.
>>
>> Instead, there are very high chances that that time would have been spent on
>> some other project. In which case that time is totally lost from geda point
>> of view.
>>
>> Thus bashing people for not following your way does not do any good. This
>> sort of behaviour contributes in getting poor more than forks or
>> alternatives. I know relaizing that "their way for them is as true as your
>> way for you" is hard, but you could maybe try.
>
> This all is why I'm tolerating xorn in geda-gaf, and probably our
Sorry, but "tolerance" is not the word that pops in mind reading your
mailing list activity. It's more like "try to use any opportinuty to
advertise how xorn is a bad idea, and maybe try to convince users
to turn it off". Just my impression.
> pcb developers are tolerating your ads while you seem to break our
> (not so large) community. I see your and Roland's great work, but
> the attitude you have chosen is not consolidating. BTW, there is
And this is where we totally disagree. What I am doing with pcb-rnd is not
breaking the community. Have you been following pcb mainline recently?
It's not like there's a prospecting, fast paced development there and I'm
trolling users to accidentally download my software instead of mainline.
Your point of view is that alternatives are bad, and you have the key, you
know the One True Way. I totally see how xorn or pcb-rnd is bad in that
model of the world. Others models differ, and it's a very common model to
provide alternatives and let users decide what to use. I am happy to see
pcb devs tolerate this.
About my "ads": from my point of view, you are doing the same with scheme,
advertising scripts and addons to keep the thing alive, to maybe convince
some user that scheme is what they should love after all, via posting
scripts. Others post their success stories about how they used some
misfeature of gschem in their $$$ projects. And the community tolerates
all this. And it's all fine: the users can chose at the end.
> another side of the coin. Xorn still fails in various places and
> on different machines for me (at home or at work), and I have no
> time to work on it, so I wouldn't release it as is now. OTOH, it
> prevents me to release the new version of the whole geda-gaf
> because it needs much more work than if it wouldn't be in. I tried
Like if guile was not failing for different users. Like if guile was not
one of the reasons gschem didn't have a working windows port for a long
time (correct me if I am wrong).
Honestly, I am not a python fan either, but as an user, I would go for
python+xorn instead of scheme any time. The size of the python ecosystem
is probably comparable with guile's, but I see much less problems with
getting python working on random systems. It well may be that python would
be the next guile in a 10 or 15 years time scale (e.g. in popularity).
Maybe it'd be C. We don't know. What we know is that guile is not easier
to set up than python today.
Regards,
Igor2
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