Re: Status of development. was: [screen-devel] Patches (and vert. splits)

[Micah Cowan]

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William Pursell wrote:
> Micah Cowan wrote:
>> William Pursell wrote:
>>  
>>> Please note that the fFtT patch was superseded by another submitted
>>> to the mailing list Sat, 21 Oct 2006 16:01:13 +0100.
>>> (The version in git has at least one serious bug. )
>>>     
>>
>> Thanks to bringing that to my attention; I had been planning on applying
>> that as-is, after a basic review.
>>
>> Are you aware of any other potential problems with the remaining patches
>> in that dir?
>>
>>   
> I am not familiar with any.  Was the "new maintainer" issue resolved in
> the other thread?   I haven't looked at screen for awhile, and I'm a bit
> confused.  From the mailing list, it looks like development is starting
> to pick up a bit (and thank you Micah for the git migration) but  there
> are only 2 git commits this year, and master~3 is Michael's from
> February of 2007.    Is development taking place off list?   Am
> I missing something?...(perhaps everything!)

Nope.

I believe I'm going to be a new co-maintainer, and jw and mls will
continue to remain co-maintainers. This sounded like it met with Karl's
approval, but I don't believe it's official until RMS gives his blessing.

Development, as of yet, has not picked up. I converted the CVS repo to
git, and I've only applied one patch (was a very simple one that looked
obviously correct). So far, my activity has been limited to organizing
the bug-lists to something I can manage, and participating in the
mailing lists and on IRC.

A large part of why I haven't done more, is that I've been busy working
on a tool I've wanted to write for a long time, that will be
tremendously useful to me in diagnosing/debugging certain types of
issues with Screen (it's a tool that gives an analysis of escape
sequences; it can be used to describe what a mainstream terminal might
do in response to sequences; or just identify them as sequences on lines
by themselves, which in itself is useful for analyzing diffs between
sequences produced for different terms, etc). Once that's done, I'll at
least be folding some existing patches into the repo. The tool is coming
along nicely, so it'll probably stop stealing the focus relatively soon. :)

However, my development activity in Screen is likely to be pretty low
even at its best, since my focus remains on Wget, and there's plenty of
work that needs doing for _that_ (and even my development activity on
_that_ is pretty spotty). So, I'm really going to be looking for some
help with development. I plan to write a help request on Savannah, which
was surprisingly effective for Wget; and any help any of you would like
to offer (mainly, towards things that are on the Savannah buglist and
currently targeted for 4.1.0) will be very much appreciated.

There's also much documentation work to be done. Even aside from the
task of unifying the man and info manuals, which I don't really expect
to take place before the next release, there are several new features
that need documentation. Of course, this mostly means being able to
figure out how they work from the code, so I suppose it's as much a
programmer's task as it is a technical writer's. :\

I think, at this point, I can't be too choosy: I'll be happy to help
train good C programmers who lack familiarity with terminals, to be able
to pitch in with Screen. We really need what help we can get.

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer,
and GNU Wget Project Maintainer.
http://micah.cowan.name/
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