Re: new DOS source
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jul 07, 2013
- 4292 views
if there is no interest, you want need a maintainer.
Are you saying we don't need a maintainer for projects that do have a lot of interest from the general public?
I ask this since I had a hard time parsing andi49's sentence, so I'm not actually sure at all what is being said here.
No, actually the reverse. We don't need a maintainer for projects that have little interest. It would not be a wise thing to actively maintain an edition of Euphoria that very few people might ever use.
I'm much more inclined to agree with this than with what I think andi49 said. However, ultimately I feel that if someone's joy is to do it, then we should let them. That's the FOSS way.
That is the situation as I see it right now. Currently there is next to zero interest in developing applications in Euphoria to run on exclusively DOS-like platforms.
No one said "exclusively". Don't compare apples to oranges.
I always assumed that we did have major interest in a DOS version (major users bring BRyan, kinz, achury, eukat, but also probably a 'silent' majority), but we had to drop DOS support despite that since there was no longer any individual capable of maintaining it.
But is there? Are you assuming that people want to develop applications - using Euphoria - that are designed to explicitly run on DOS platforms?
I don't need to assume this - we already know people on this forum who want to use Euphoria to develop new applications that are designed to explicitly run on DOS platforms. In addition, they also want to be able to maintain and extend existing applications that ran on DOS in earlier versions.
I'm not so sure that there is such an interest. Especially as we have no-one holding their hand up here - and if not here then where?
Um, BRyan (and his claimed userbase that he's trying to support), achury, eukat, ....
it's more that there is little interest in working on something that is is little value to the community.
Based on the lack of answer to my open call for dos developers, I'd agree that there seems to be little interest in working on something like this. On the other hand, I'd argue that supporting DOS is worth more than supporting Windoze 9x - but we continue to do that since a few users still use it and supporting them is so cheap (so we are able to distinguish ourselves from other things that have fropped 9x support).
The full cost-benefit analysis matters here - and as Jeremy pointed out, DOS support was extremely expensive. Therefore, it's reasonable to ask for a higher level of interest for DOS. Ultimately, though, I feel that if someone's joy in life is to do this, why not let them?
Also, its not that there are no current developers who are not "capable of maintaining it" - because there are certainly are -
Please identity them. I, a current member of the developer team, certainly have no idea who they could be.
Remember that the initial catalyst for dropping DOS support was a bug that no one could fix: http://openeuphoria.org/forum/107540.wc#107540 http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=23280577
That bug (getting call_back() to work on DOS, something that had never been the case in all of the history of Euphoria) is arguably still there. Who on this forum or de list knows enough about C and DOS extenders to get the machine code for a callback through the Causeway DOS extender so it can be called without crashing the entire application? Even Rob Craig probably didn't know how to do this (which was most likely the reason that call_back() was not supported/implemented for DOS during the time when he maintained it).
(Of course, even if someone could do it, it doesn't mean that they should be forced to do it. It's not like any of the current devs are getting paid to maintain any edition of Euphoria, after all. Everyone is doing it out of fun or love or whatever...)
I'm definitely of the opinion that it is more important to determine if there is a genuine and significant interest in a DOS edition, before we find maintainers for such a thing.
Sure, if we have to raise money and pay a professional software house to do it or something. However, I don't see the harm in testing the waters to see if anyone out there is simply interested in becoming a maintainer for it - perhaps because it's fun for them, or because they think it's neat to run a modern language on a retro environment, etc. Since I know we definitely have some users who would be interested in having someone else maintain it,
I think this is a win-win situation - those who are interested in a DOS edition (even if it it turns out to be a super tiny minority) get what they want, the maintainer gets what they want (fun, since they're doing it just for fun, or whatever), and since the rest of us don't need to get involved, it doesn't cost us anything.
Besides, there is actually some work involved in determining if there is an interest in something or not, to the point that companies spend tens of thousands of on it (e.g. http://www.fastcompany.com/1713068/insta-focus-group-gutchecks-diy-market-research ).
I don't think we need to go that far, but since you put so much important on actually determining the interest level in a DOS edition, I have to ask this.
Derek, are you willing to run a poll - or gather the data using other methods - to actually and accurately gauge the interest level in a DOS edition? If you aren't, then perhaps you would be unwise to simply assume that there is "next to zero interest" without any evidence to back it up.
