Hello, I got this from Chris, TIP's author (TIP = TIP isn't Pico)
----- Forwarded message from Chris A <allegrcr@plattsburgh.edu> -----
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 12:18:33 -0500 (EST)
From: Chris A <allegrcr@plattsburgh.edu>
To: Jordi <jordi@sindominio.net>
Subject: Re: [jordi@sindominio.net: Re: freedomization task list [was: Re: Dangerous precedent being set - possible serious violation of the GPL]]
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 =)
> 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.
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...
Chris A
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Chris | Labs/Classrooms | Plattsburgh
Allegretta | Technician | State University
http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/astyanax
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