Re: [screen-devel] screen maintainer

[Juergen Weigert]

Ahoj Amadeusz!

Welcome aboard. Do you have an account at savannah? If so, I am happy to
grant you admin privileges on screen. 

Others: I trust you figure it out how to prevent Amadeusz from removing all
the features that you love. He appears to be willing to discuss things.
I believe someone who is 'brave enough' to do releases is very important.
Just don't try to make a perfect release.

Maintaining a stable 4.x branch while collecting for a 5.0 is nice to
have. But it is a maintenance overhead.  Maybe it is needed these days. 
When I did screen releases, a dead simple 'release early - release often'
strategy was just fine.

I'd actually suggest, Amadeusz does a 4.1.90 beta release directly from his
branch as is, to show the world, that he is serious about doing releases, 
and to invite the critics. (From *not looking* at the code for years, I am 
unable
to tell, which changes would hurt.) Having your version released as beta -
just for the reviews - might help to learn what is important.

I'd directly bump the version to 4.2 -- several 4.1.0 version are floating
around. Try google them.

I would not remove the 'ancient code #ifdefs' without being prepared to move
them back in, as soon as complaints come up. The old dynix, sunos or hpux 
systems that we used 20 years ago ago as our main development platforms may
be still around somewhere. You never know :-)

I love the nethack feature. It reminds me of playing nethack back at the
good old days. Well, so much for sentiments. Get over it. Kill that feature.
Keep the nethack option as a documented noop for compatibility in the config 
file for a while, but who would understand the messages these days?
It hurts a little, as it degrades readability somewhat. A proper
implementation would first add locale support, then add a nethack-locale.

Speaking of readability: Having the curly braces opening at the
far end of an if statement is K&R style for sure. Personally I'd say the 
GNU style, where one can rely on the opening and closing braces 
to be in the same column is more readable. But I don't really mind, 
I can read both.
Whover is editing the files most can ask others to accept his coding
style. That is a fair request.

Someone complaind that he did not get access to the repo on savannah. 
That was not on purpose. It just slipped me. Sorry. 

I wasn't aware that nobody else would exercise his admin rights.
This thread did much better, obviously. :-)

        cheers,
                JW-


On Apr 02, 14 16:27:53 +0200, Amadeusz Sławiński wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> seeing as we came yet again to standstill with new release, I would like
> to volunteer myself as GNU Screen maintainer.
> 
> Some of you may know that I maintain separate development tree on github
> (https://github.com/amade/screen/tree/devel/src) in which I have a more
> than 300 changes committed in comparison with official tree. So I may
> as well do this officially ;)
> Changes include:
> * new features (256 colors in hardstatus, hardstatus on top,
> truecolor, ...)
> * removal of ancient code (removed most of #ifdef for ancient systems)
> * removal of features which didn't seem useful or could be replaced
> * rewrites of some functionality
> * bug fixes
> * code reformatting (the source is much more readable now).
> Some of the removed things may need to be reintroduced, but that's what
> development is about. Goal is to hear what features people want and to
> get things going again.
> 
> First thing I would do, would be releasing current git tree as
> screen-4.1 also opening separate version 4 branch, only for bug fixes
> so distributions have something recent to base their packages on.
> Next step would be merging my 'devel' branch into master and start
> developing version 5.
> 
> Comments, suggestions, alternative solutions?
> 
> Amadeusz Sławiński
> 

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