[fim-devel] Announcement of the FIM - Fbi IMproved developement mailing list: Welcome!

[Michele Martone]

This is the first email to the FIM program developement mailing list!

FIM is still work in progress, but with a solid code basis.
Right now the developement is in the hands of a single person (me),
and the code is still not in the Savannah project SVN repository.

It will be there as soon as a stable release will be mature, to debut
with a first usable tarball.

Meanwhile, this list should be the place where the first FIM users:
presumably also curious people, often coders, and command line 
interface freaks, should discuss the developement of Fim.


Actually the code seems stable.
A lot of features are already in the code base. Some features would be
desirable, as a scrolling testual console, a better error reporting, or
a better environment-sensible syntax autocompletion.
The documentation is also copious (1300+ lines), although a little
vague. Let me explain why.


The problems we are facing now with Fim concern the syntax and
semantics of its language. It is in large part defined and working, but
still marked as 'temporary'. 

The reason for this is because Fim aims at :
 - being as confortable as possible to Vim users
 - being 'natural' and 'intuitive' in its differentiations with Vim (vim
   is and editor, fim an image viewer, and this sole fact could pose fim
   under a wierd light :) )

Therefore, some solid 'research' should be done reading the Vim manuals
and understanding what language constructs and rules are essential to
Fim and which - maybe - not.

This research should also result in a good understanding of the
variables manipolation semantics (for example : should some variable
change trigger some action or not? should be the possibility of variable
aliasing ? should there exist a syntactical trick of prepending a 
variable  name with no- in order to set to a negative value ? should
there at all be boolean variables ? ...   ), as well as the implications
of namespace adoption (a feature which is already in Fim ; should the 
scoped variables inherit global or default value ? should inherit them 
from 'parent' objects ? environment ? windows, viewport, browser, etc..),
and the syntax for abbreviations, and autocompletion (should the
autocompletion be 'automatic' or 'tunable', with user-settable 'hint'
prefixes ? ).

This is a fragment of the existing 'questions pool' and its
consequences. Other questions await.  But of course, Fim is 'only' an
image viewer, so all of these understandings and the spent effort should
be focused to gain a flexible, (possibly self-)documented, and hopefully
 - stable - program.

Seeing from the last developement results, it seems that all is going
well, so right now testing, user feedback, documentation fixes, and bug
fixing (no crashes nor major anomalies seems to occur anymore) is what
it is really needed for the project.

So I'll put some effort in my spare time to foster and promote this
project, expressing my love for free software, hopeful that it will meet
the favour of the free software users community.

There is additional (meta) info on the freshmeat page of Fim [1].
In the future all of the Fim related stuff will be located on Savannah
[2].

The current public SVN repository and related intructions are  accessible
through the first of the two links [1].


   [1] http://freshmeat.net/projects/fbi_improved/ 
   [2] http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fbi-improved/

------

 Michele