From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Chuck Gelm Subject: Re: Writing AX.25 Server Progie Date: Wed, 01 Jan 2003 12:45:44 -0500 Sender: linux-hams-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <3E132948.57A2C44F@gelm.net> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: "Curt Mills, WE7U" Cc: linux-hams@vger.kernel.org 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!"