Re: status of xwpe-alpha

[Jan Dvorak <johnydog@go.cz>]

On Mon, Sep 04, 2000 at 06:19:25PM -0400, Kenneth W. Flynn wrote:
> >Development of xwpe is very slow going.  A new version will be made
> As for CVS, there really are not any good security options.  Making a CVS 
> server available is basically a big security hole.  Even with read-only 
> access, it still is not good.  I use CVS at work, but not with any publicly 
> available access.

what about sourceforge.net ? it provides CVS, mailing lists, bug tracking
and more ...

> 
> >The basic problem is I'm not interested in writing an IDE.  If I were
> >to start writing one it probably wouldn't reach parity with the
> >current xwpe.  So instead I do small tweaks every once in a while
> >and slowly improve xwpe.
> 
> I think that's true of most of us on the list.  IDE's are not exciting.  I 
..
> I think Xwpe is going to go on existing as it is until somebody gets up the 
> energy to rewrite it from scratch, preferably in C++ (or Java, so it could 
> work on Windows?).  At that point, why call it Xwpe?  And I'm not sure 
> about keeping the Turbo-C L&F.  So...  The real problem is that no one has 
> written a good IDE for UNIX.  Arguably no one has written a good IDE, 
> period, but that's a whole 'nother debate.  Xwpe is the best there is, 
> which is why I use it, but it has many flaws.

If rewriting, it will be better to do in C, it can be extended into C++
easily. Java is good for platform independent things which xwpe really isn't.
I prefer C even in portability things, coz Java is as portable as
interpretor is ... but that is really for another debate :)

I think nowadays is nobody really interested in IDE, because different
people have different needs and such one big thing can't do it all. 
It's unix tradition, to have many one-purpose utils, combining them 
together is really powerfull, and you can replace any of them if
you want (ls | grep is better than ls with grepping function).

I am thinking aout ideal prog. editor for me as of that, which can be
extended by external programs, does the repeately, often work for me 
(such as walking error messages from compiler, man pages, finding
 definitions via ctags). This definitions meets very closely xwpe,
and when i first saw it, i was fascinated. But than i realize some bugs, and
some missing features so i keep away from it for month. Now i bought *real*
graphics card, and i was looking for X editor. And i realized that xwpe
mailing list is dead. So that is the story of my interest in xwpe.

Allright, i'll attempt to do the major rewrite of it, and if i fail,
someone else can succeed (in Java,C++,...), so at least i try :), no
damage can be done (to xwpe of course, i don't know how killable this
will be for my psychic :) ). 

Jan Dvorak <johnydog@go.cz>