Re: Suggestions

[Steven Rubin]

        I recently unsubscribed from the gnu-electric mailing list due to the fact that it seems to be mostly SPAM these days. I would still like to receive notification of software updates and any other related announcements. I would recommend changing to an AOL or Yahoo group for discussions. Administrators of these groups can delete accounts of users that generate SPAM. I host a VLSI group on AOL (http://groups.aol.com/vlsichips) and have found it to be a nice forum for discussions and software release announcements. I am also a member of a Yahoo group for Java programmers and it seems to work nicely too. Since both types of group require registration it pretty much eliminates SPAM. Even if you do not want to set up such a group, if you'll send my your release announcements I'd be happy to post them on my AOL site.

The reason that I use GNU mailing lists is that my software is
distributed through GNU.  I'm not inclined to start a discussion
board elsewhere, since there isn't much activity on this one, and I don't
want to fragment something so small.  If you think the GNU people
are being lax in their handling of this list, please contact them. 
I would love to see them make their lists more useful.

I should point out that I maintain my own list of addresses, culled from
this mailing list and others.  I send announcements of new releases
on my own list, so unsubscribing from the GNU list will not affect your
EMails from me.

> On another subject, have you
> considered hosting the project on SourceForge
> (http://sourceforge.net)? It would
> be a nice way to bring other developers into the project to help
> eliminate some of the bugs and set up some standardized test cases.
> There's also a nice bug tracking tool at
> http://www.bugzilla.org/ that you
> may be interested in. A distribution via CVS would be cool too.

Electric source code is already on a CVS server: the GNU CVS server
(savannah.gnu.org).  However, I only allow a select few people to
commit code to the repository: you must start by sending the code to me
for evaluation.

> I know there is a fair amount of
> effort in the current GUI. But have you ever considered using a Java or
> TCL/TK front end to improve portability to other platforms? I have
> compiled the latest release on Mac OS-X (10.1.5) under X11R6/Xfree86 and
> as a Cocoa application. Both seem to have GUI related issues, some of
> which are fatal bugs. I can provide the crash logs/tracebacks if you are
> interested. I'll send you any patches that I come up with.

Every year, someone tells me to port the GUI to another world. 
Electric started using X on UNIX, advanced to Macintosh toolbox, Windows
MFC, Athena widgets on UNIX, Motif widgets on UNIX, and now also Qt
(UNIX/Windows/Macintosh OS 10).  Qt is, to my mind, the best
opportunity to unify the interface for platform independence, and I'm not
inclined to look elsewhere at the moment.

The problems with OS 10 are well known.  It was documented in the
6.06 release that Electric's native (carbon) interface was buggy.  A
newer Qt-based interface is slated for the next release (due out in about
a month).

>      -Steven
> Rubin