[9fans] drawterm

[Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>]

> Release early, release often, and if you don't like it, look at Google.

Not sure what you mean about Google, but I don't care.

Release often implies that you have the time and inclination to work
on the project, so that there are often new changes to release.
For dt2k, I have neither.  Drawterm is a giant crock.  It duplicates tons
of code, it's hard to debug, it doesn't do half the things I wish it would,
and unfortunately it's really really useful to a lot of people, myself included.

I've actually written three attempts at 9P2000 drawterms.  Each time
I've ended up with a big program with some subtle bugs in threading
or X11 or god-only-knows, and the whole thing crashes after a few
hours or whenever you do something complicated like resize acme.
(Come to think of it, the current one frequently crashes when I resize
acme.  So I don't resize acme much.)

Release early, release often assumes you have a working program
that people will find useful enough to change.  Apparently dt2k was
useful enough to change, but I wouldn't have characterized the early
versions as useful.  I only grudingly started using it instead of the old
drawterm when Bell Labs forced us to turn off the old unencrypted
services.

Apparently my sin was that back in 2003 when I first posted to 9fans
I should have posted a URL for the tar file instead of asking people
to mail me (at the time, the tar file wasn't on the web or I would have).
But at least a dozen people have asked for and gotten the source,
and most I never heard from again.

I'm very happy that Skip, Brucee, Geoff, and Andrey have made
dt2k better.  Many thanks to them.  You haven't, and yet you've
known, since at least as far back as April 12 (see THM log), that
there was a copy on Andrey's U.Calgary site.  You were reminded
again on June 23.  Claiming that it has been locked in a vault is just
plain wrong.

You're growing into Boyd's shoes quite well -- lots of whining,
hardly any actual contribution, and convenient memory loss
to reinforce your desired view of the world.

For what it's worth, I just diffed the source Andrey posted in the THM
against the current CVS.  Hardly anything has changed: there is support
for buttons 4 and 5 and slightly better keysym handling.  Anyone who
made changes to the April 12 version would have been doing useful work.
The status hasn't changed since April 12 either: it's still unstable,
it needs work before it can go into the distribution, and I am happy to
accept contributions from other pepople.

Russ


http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/thm_2005-04-12_Log/
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/thm_2005-06-23_Log/