Hello Chris! On Thu, Dec 09, 1999 at 12:18:33PM -0500, Chris A wrote: > On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Jordi wrote: > > > Hello Chris, > > > > I imagine that someone else will have contacted you already. > > There's a nice thread going on in the debian-devel list > > (debial-devel@lists.debian.org), talking about the "freedomization tasks", > > or how to provide free alternatives of non-free programs in the distribution > > or how to patch these non-free programs to make them free (such as xearth, > > which will be free in short), etc. > > Along comes, of course, the Pine and Pico case. There has been a lot of > > discussion on this one, as Pine, and in extension Pico are very popular > > programs - how to clone it, how to make other programs to emulate it > > correctly, etc. And, Ray saw tip on Freshmeat, as you can read below. > > > > Well then, I just wanted to know how do you feel about all these ideas, how > > is tip's development going, if you need help (which I'm sure you'd promptly > > get) and if you are willing to contribute to this Pine Clone that is about > > to start. > > Wow, I just added the program to the freshmeat appindex *yesterday*, did > it get announced on the main page as well? =) Yes, I've gotten quite a > few emails actually, lots of praise and one person who wanted to help out. > No one has mailed me regadring a PINE suite or debian though. > > TIP's development is coming along rather well. Unfortunately for the > world I'm just a huge hacker, so I doubt my code is very legible or > pretty. I started the project about two months ago, and have been working > on it a few hours a week; sometimes I'll get rolling and work on it for a > few hours straight in one night, it's fun work. > > As you'd probably guess, my original idea was to make a complete PINE > clone under the GPL, but after thinking about it a few minutes I realized > that I could just do the text editor and it could be linked into the main > program. Plus as a former CS major I realized that I would have killed > for an editor like the one TIP aims to be, simple and yet with > functionality Pico doesn't have. I would love the opportunity to have TIP > as the editor of a PINE clone (my original name for my clone was ICEBERG, > a little pun on tip), when it does one or two more things. > > I've already used TIP as the 'alternate editor' in PINE and it worked very > well at the time, which made me feel pretty good about it =) I personally don't use Pine as MUA, I use Mutt instead, but I know this is good news for the people in debian planning to work on a free Pine replacement. I see that using tip as the editor should clear a rather big amount of the work on that task. Also, the main goal for this effort that these Debian developers are looking is to be able to provide an alternative to two very popular non-free packages, rather than enhancing them. Of course, enhancements always come along any program rewrite, but I think it isn't the main purpose. > > Also, how would you feel about a debian package of tip? I already made one, > > but nothing official. > > Well, I'll be honest. If you've looked through the code you know it > isn't pretty. Considering that, I cant say the program crashes very often > which is good. But, I realy dont consider TIP to be good enough right now > for the debian distro, particularly because of the way it (doesnt) handle > tabs. Once that's fixed I'd think it would be okay to use um, as long as > everyone knows it's experimental. You can make unofficial packages of it > of course as much as you want. IMHO, version number 0.5.5 is enough to tell people about the status of tip. Also, Debian packages come with the docs provided with the sources, and this includes your BUGS and TODO files. There are many other programs in the Debian archive in a situation similar to tip's. Also, but this isn't up to me, if tip was taken as base editor for pine clone, I'm sure you'd recieve help, patches or whatever to solve these problems quickly. > Honestly, I've always wanted to become a contributor to the debian > project, as a package maintainer or something. I just dont have the time > right now, as my personal and professionl lives are in a bit of tumult > (I may be changing jobs, and hence maybe moving somewhere else). Plus > I've just been too lazy to figure out how to make .debs, even though they > are my favorite package managent system by far. > > > You may reply here or to the debian-devel@lists.debian.org list directly. > > I'll just reply to you for this mail and you can paraphrase or just copy > it to the list if you like at a good point in the discussion. =) Thanks > for your interest and have a great day =) > > P.S. I hope TIP wasn't the reason for the "Possible serious violation of > the GPL" in the subject, I assume it's just a continued subject from > another thread on the list... *grin*, it isn't. When I sent my first mail to you, it had little to do with any violation of the GPL license, but with a list of non-free packages that should be 'freedomized'. Ok, now we only need to see what the people at -devel say about this :) Cheers, Jordi
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