Thor news program OPEN SOURCE PROJECT

[woody57]

Lopos2000 has been pursuing all leads with software registration owners in our attempt to further the keyfile situation

In regard to this THOR,s owner Peter Nielson has replied showing possible interest in making this program OPEN SOURCE & continuing its devlopment with help from interested board members.

This news has been passed RCK because Peter would be looking for a similarset up to sourceforge.net

quote " I think I would prefer a model such as the one used on sourceforge.net. What infrastructure do you have for source control? "

While this question is certainly a valid one, do other members of this board believe that a news program is a worthy project for EAB to be involved in or that Peter's requirements are beyond our current resources ?

[ant512]

Why not create a SourceForge project?

[dondilly]

Yup, why go for a system similar to sourceforge when you can use sourceforge.
Obviously as most of their developement boxes are geared towards unix/linux on various cpu platforms so we couldnt use sourceforge for builds. But Sourceforge would be ideal for use as a sourcecode repositry and for binary distribution. Im not sure how good or flakey their forum system is, maybe that is one area where EAB/abime could help with resources. It would be cool if we could help keep this program alive.

Obviously if the program goes opensource, Peter would lose control over what platforms it is ported to, but that can work both ways. For example if we can get interest from the AROS team, a port to their platform should hopefully remove any endian issues within the code and might even get work porting to using posix/x11 libraries which would then make it a sinch to port to anything.

It might actually be a good idea to discuss and try and gain advice from some of the other amiga projects, such as the amiga project on sourceforge, the aros team and also the guys working on aweb.

The other thing if it is going to be open sourced is to try and work out some sort of roadmap as to where we want to take the 'official' version.

Though not with CVS I do have a lot of configuration control experience on avionic systems projects so I do know what is needed if you are going to have multiple people chiping away at source code and then want to stand any chance of putting it back together into a compilable (and working) build.

A big pat on the back should go to woody and Lopos for getting us this far :-)

[dondilly]

just to add to the above hopefully without sounding like I am talking to myself. Though I would recommend suggesting to Peter, the author that it should be opened up on sourceforge. I think we should not only encourage him but give him as much support as possible.
That doesnt necessarily mean coding effort or web resources, there are many things that people can help with, the obvious non techy thing is things like the maintenance and translation of any documentation.
There are other things with that program that would need attention such as someoe experienced in the differences between Rexx and the amiga port arexx to ensure the portability of scripts.

I think the way to go with this if he is agreable is to initially set up a project on sourceforge with the sourcecode available, set up a front end site there and then post around possible interested boards and dev groups to draw attention to it.

I was chatting on the Aros irc channel earlier where there were positive noises being made. The suggestion there was if we dont go fr a full posix build to in the first instance modify the program if at all possible to use the classact/reactor api to ease porting to aros and even OS3.5 and above.
The problem is that in truth he/we are not going to know how much support the project will gain until he actually has something tangible posted on sourceforge.