Re: [bug-gtypist] Potential for a few updates

[Simon Baldwin]

Hi Felix,

Thank you for the note, and for nursing gtypist along for all these years! I am surprised (and humbled) to find that it still survives.

To answer your question about why not C++ here... a couple of reasons, neither very good ones. At one time there was -- somewhere, but I lost it long ago and all online traces seem to have disappeared -- a C++ version. But around 16 or 17 years ago, C++ was only poorly supported, and I had a lot of trouble making the source portable, and eventually I just threw it away. So I did not feel much like "reinventing the wheel".

But I did have some ideas about how an OO-like but pure C program might work, and was interested in making the code look like it perhaps should have looked back in 1998, so played around with ansi C instead. And I did not expect to go as far with it as I did in the end.

With hindsight, none of these is a strong reason for sticking with C. C++ is far better supported now than it was then, and this would have been the perfect time to change over. But here we are anyway.

I also have some regrets about other design decisions I made in 1998. In particular, it now seems completely unnecessary that I turned this into another 'scripting language'. The logic really belongs in the program, not the 'data' files. Oh well. If you look at this you can see where my influences came from. 

Finally, thanks for your notes on UTF-8 and gengetopt. I am not sure when I will have more time to work on this, but if/when I do, I will make certain to start on the UTF-8 support and ignore gengetopt.

Best regard,

--S

On Saturday, 26 May 2018, 10:35:52 BST, Felix Natter <address@hidden> wrote:

Simon Baldwin <address@hidden> writes:

> FYI, you can now find a source drop of the code I recently wrote
> relating to gtypist here:
> https://github.com/OnePointSixOneEight/typist
>
> Please feel free to extract anything from it that you think might be
> useful to you.

hello Simon,

thank you for writing GTypist years ago, many people find it very useful.
The code is not very good yes, but since it is not very complex, I think
it is ok :-)

I have been the GTypist (co-)maintainer for the last ~15 years (with
various maintainers like lastly Tim Marston).  Since I am active in
Debian and the freeplane project (http://freeplane.org) since 2012, I no
longer have time for this.

> On Wednesday, 16 May 2018, 17:37:46 BST, Simon Baldwin <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> As the original author of gtypist way back, I have spent the past two
> decades in some embarrassment at the quality of the code I wrote back
> then. This finally got the better of me, to the point where I sat down
> recently and rewrote large pieces of it to be more maintainable and
> modular.

Thank you for publishing this. I am curious, since your code is
object-based, why don't you use C++? Personal preference?

If you add UTF-8 locale support (and support for other 8-bit locales
using iconv), we could use your 3.0 for further development :-) (I think
it is easy to use our multibyte changes in your repo).

Do you even intend to maintain this?  Is anyone else on this list
willing to take over as maintainer?

A note about the current state of GTypist 2.10 (master branch): We
started to move to GNU gengetopt [1] for option parsing, but this will
probably have to be reverted because Tim's gengetopt patch for i18n of
gengetopt's output is not finalized (and for instance for Debian, you
have to build everything from source, also cmdline.[ch]).

Gengetopt has the ability to read a simple config file to support
default options. We have a "welcome screen" that makes use of this
(you can choose to disable the welcome screen in which case we add
"no-welcome-screen" to the config file).
Also, "clutton" changed the build system for OSX.

2.10 (master) is unreleased, but we provided many updates to 2.9.x
(branch-2.9 branch).

There are a few requests on this mailing list which have not yet been
processed.

So whoever would like to take over, I am happy to help with this.

[1]

https://www.gnu.org/software/gengetopt/

Cheers and Best Regards,
--
Felix Natter