Re: Writing AX.25 Server Progie

[Chuck Gelm <nc8q@gelm.net>]

Hi, Curt:

 Thanks for your informative response.
I'll try a 'stable' release of Xastir soon.
However, I have no idea what CVS is.
Is CVS are requirement?

Chuck

"Curt Mills, WE7U" wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Chuck Gelm wrote:
> 
> > Howdy, Y'all:
> >
> >  IMHO, from what I can tell after subscribing to the Xastir list
> > for several weeks, is that
> > the code is development or prototype rather than
> > stable.
> 
> Funny!  That's the nature of open-source:  It'll constantly be in
> development because we're constantly improving it, not because it's
> buggy.  With ten developers and 100's of things we want to add,
> we'll never be done.  If we suddenly implemented everything on the
> feature request list, the users would come up with another 200
> things they'd want.  Overnight!
> 
> If you saw little development activity, no discussion on the mailing
> lists, and no new releases coming out of the project, that's when
> you'd know the project is getting stale and might come to a complete
> halt.  Those are the warning signs of a dying open-source project.
> 
> The nature of coding though is that when you add new code, you add
> new bugs.  Each new feature requires a few days to fix the new bugs
> introduced.  Typically these are very minor and don't affect much
> more than the new feature itself.  We just went through a period
> where we were rather active at adding new features, and we're just
> getting to the end of the debug period.
> 
> Other things you've probably read about are cases where a new Linux
> distribution comes out and the distribution is not done correctly.
> When users try to compile/run Xastir on them, Xastir shows off the
> problems in the distribution.  In this case we can kick
> SuSE/RedHat/Mandrake/etc in the behind and tell them to fix up their
> distributions.
> 
> Try it out and tell us how often Xastir falls over, then try one of
> the Windows programs and see how long they last.  In fact, try
> both of them hooked up to the full firenet feed for a week (you'll
> get around 20,000 objects on your screen).  Most of the Windows APRS
> apps will croak, and croak quickly.
> 
> Xastir "development" versions are much more bug-free than the last
> "stable" release (from last February).  New "development" versions
> come out about every two weeks.  We're about due for another one.
> 
> Users who don't want to participate in the development will
> typically run the development releases or the "stable" release if
> they don't know any better.  User's that want to try out all the new
> features the second they're added run the CVS version and update
> often (every day works reasonably well).  CVS makes this easy/fast
> to do.
> 
> That was fun.  Where else can I cause trouble now?
> 
> --
> Curt Mills, WE7U                    hacker_NO_SPAM_@tc.fluke.com
> Senior Methods Engineer/SysAdmin
> "Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math!"
> "Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates!" -- WE7U
> "The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"