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fractdev-digest       Wednesday, January 5 2000       Volume 01 : Number 026




----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 20:02:31 -0600
From: "Tim Wegner" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: (fractdev) DPMI for DOS

Tim G. asked:

> Is there some sort of list or outline describing what a new
> license must necessarily preserve or emphasize?

There are some good web sites summarizing the different
licenses. I'll try to locate one and we can discuss it here.

I've read the opinion that it is very bad to create a special license,
because the waters get very muddy when you start incorporating
other open source code. So I'd like to go with a GPL license, a
BSD license, or one of the two or three main variations.

> Where can I get the latest code sync for the fp only base?
> I'd like to start running this dream down..  I'll be using a
> sparc10 to run and test XFract, but I'll also be building
> some prototypes and developing on a Mac.

I'll make this available to you as soon as I can before the weekend -
 from Friday through Sunday this week I have a lot of other
activities. Jonathan reported to me his visit with you and I am very
interested in working with you. He and I are going to start work on
a 32 bit version, probably in djgpp for starters. The important point
is to have a large core of portable 32 bit code that all 32 bit
implementations share. That's why I'd like to work with you on this.
Once we get going on any sort of 32 bit environment with
something that works, eveolution can be fast, and we can all stay
synched to the core source.

I am interested in using GTK+ for the GUI. This *may* work on
Windows also. But even if your Mac version needs separate GUI
code, there's a lot of value in sharing as much generic non-GUI
code as possible and staying together.

Tim W.


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------------------------------

Date: Mon,  1 Nov 1999 23:16:17 -0800
From: tim gilman <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: (fractdev) DPMI for DOS

> [e-mail] (Tim Wegner) wrote:
> (on 11/1/99 at 8:02 PM)
> I'll make this available to you as soon as I can before the weekend -

No hurry!

> Jonathan reported to me his visit with you and I am very
> interested in working with you. He and I are going to start work on
> a 32 bit version, probably in djgpp for starters. The important point
> is to have a large core of portable 32 bit code that all 32 bit
> implementations share. That's why I'd like to work with you on this.

I'm forcing myself to code in parallel on the Mac and my linux box.
This way I hope to keep the code base portable.  Well, or heavily
dependent on two distinct platforms.  That should force some GUI
separation, right?!   heh.

> Once we get going on any sort of 32 bit environment with
> something that works, eveolution can be fast, and we can all stay
> synched to the core source.
>
> I am interested in using GTK+ for the GUI. This *may* work on
> Windows also. But even if your Mac version needs separate GUI
> code, there's a lot of value in sharing as much generic non-GUI
> code as possible and staying together.
>
> Tim W.

Agreed!  Is there an ongoing list of desirables for this next-gen
engine?  32 bit clean is a must, but I'm curious to know if any
consideration for multiple engine instances, plug-in support for
fractal/platform-specific optimizations, and other Star Trek
technologies has been kicked around.  Granted, there's a big amount of
work to get through before this'll be close to a reality, but my brain
likes to feed on problems well in advance of actual execution.

Enough of me!  Let me know when the fp code base is ready for ftp'n, and
I'll start working on my carpel tunnel syndrome..

=- Tim G.
[e-mail]



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------------------------------

Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 10:20:59 -0700
From: Phil McRevis <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: (fractdev) DPMI for DOS

Sounds like you could use the partial work I've done on separating the
GUI code from the engine code.

Should I make a diff and put it up for FTP?

What I did was abstract out the GUI/driver functions and massage the
code to call through those functions.  I haven't worked on it for some
time, as I took a job again and have been working for $$.

However, if someone else is going down that road, you would benefit
quite a bit from what I've already done.
- --
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    ``Ain't it funny that they all fire the pistol,
      at the wrong end of the race?''--PDBT
[e-mail]    <http://www.thewho.net>

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Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 11:10:45 -0700
From: Phil McRevis <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: (fractdev) DPMI for DOS

In article <mS/[e-mail]>,
    "Tim Wegner" <[e-mail]>  writes:

> I've read the opinion that it is very bad to create a special license,
> because the waters get very muddy when you start incorporating
> other open source code. So I'd like to go with a GPL license, a
> BSD license, or one of the two or three main variations.

That sounds like a great idea: unifying the license to all the code
under one "standard" open source license.

Will there be difficulty obtaining permission from authors who have
slapped their own wacky open source license on their contributions?
Will some pieces need to be rewritten because of license issues?
- --
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/>    Legalize Adulthood!
    ``Ain't it funny that they all fire the pistol,
      at the wrong end of the race?''--PDBT
[e-mail]    <http://www.thewho.net>

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------------------------------

Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 20:13:50 -0600
From: "Tim Wegner" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: (fractdev) DPMI for DOS

> Will there be difficulty obtaining permission from authors who have
> slapped their own wacky open source license on their contributions?
> Will some pieces need to be rewritten because of license issues?

In principle there is an issue, but in practise I don't think so. There
are really not that many people who have contributed a lot of code,
and we can reach them, and the contributions of most minor
contributors was for all intents and purposes written by us because
we massaged code extensively in the process of integrating it.

We have had the understanding from contributors for quite a while
now that we could do what we want with the code. And I think we
can deal with 100% of people who have explicit copyrights in the
code. For example, Mark Peterson has his name many places, but
we have it in writing that he renounces his rights.

In any case I expect a massive rewrite that will leave no code
unchanged.

Tim


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------------------------------

Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 22:25:19 -0600
From: "Tim Wegner" <[e-mail]>
Subject: (fractdev) licenses

Here's a list of popular licenses:

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/



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------------------------------

Date: Wed,  3 Nov 1999 01:25:01 -0800
From: tim gilman <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: (fractdev) DPMI for DOS

> [e-mail] (Phil McRevis) wrote:
> (on 11/2/99 at 10:20 AM)
>
> Sounds like you could use the partial work I've done on separating the
> GUI code from the engine code.
>
> Should I make a diff and put it up for FTP?

Yes please!  If you put up a diff, I'll definitely use it.  I would
*love* to see what you've done..

> What I did was abstract out the GUI/driver functions and massage the
> code to call through those functions.  I haven't worked on it for some
> time, as I took a job again and have been working for $$.
>
> However, if someone else is going down that road, you would benefit
> quite a bit from what I've already done.
><snip>

Yes please!  ;v)  I'm going down this road, and I'm curious to learn
about what you've done...

Yours,
- -= Tim G.
[e-mail]




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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1999 09:26:33 -0700
From: Phil McRevis <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: (fractdev) DPMI for DOS

In article <mS/[e-mail]>,
    "Tim Wegner" <[e-mail]>  writes:

> In any case I expect a massive rewrite that will leave no code
> unchanged.

That is the nature of the diff that I already have ;-).

I will put that up for FTP soon, probably this weekend.
- --
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------------------------------

Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1999 09:39:50 -0700
From: Phil McRevis <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: (fractdev) DPMI for DOS

In article <[e-mail]>,
    tim gilman <[e-mail]>  writes:

> Yes please!  If you put up a diff, I'll definitely use it.  I would
> *love* to see what you've done..

If you peruse the list archives at
<ftp://ftp.xmission.com/pub/lists/fractdev>, you'll see me describing
the approach I have taken.

> Yes please!  ;v)  I'm going down this road, and I'm curious to learn
> about what you've done...

Coming soon... I used the xfractint code base for testing, since I
could get working quicker that way.  I don't have a DOS C compiler
environment that "works out of the box" with the fractint source code.

I spent a *lot* of time poring over a printout of the source code
before I started working on it.  (Do you realize that the fractint
source, when printed double-sided is about 7 inches thick?!?)

What I did was push all the code specific to a particular kind of I/O
into a structure through a function pointer member.  Then you initialize
the structure's function pointers based on what driver you're going to
select.

The resulting code has combined "drivers" for all the kinds of
platforms: DOS, windows, X11, etc.  The intent was that under Win32 at
least you would have the option of using GDI, OpenGL or DirectX back
ends as well.
- --
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      at the wrong end of the race?''--PDBT
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 07 Nov 1999 18:19:49 -0700
From: Phil McRevis <[e-mail]>
Subject: (fractdev) initial stab at implementing drivers in fractint available

OK, I've put two files in my FTP area that you'll want to look at;
<ftp://ftp.xmission.com/pub/users/l/legalize/fractals/> contains:

- -rw-r--r--   1 legalize   623285 Nov  7 17:58 xfractint-19.61.66-diffs.txt
- -rw-r--r--   1 legalize  4208640 Nov  7 17:57 xfractint-experimental.tar

The first is a diff against 19.61 patchlevel 66 sources.  However, I
added files to the distribution and eliminated files from the
distribution, so just in case those files are missing (d_*.c), I've
put all the source in the tar file.

Some notes:

    This limps along in X11 mode, but isn't completely finished.
    In particular, the X11 port should do away with curses completely
    for the text menus and just use native X11 text (and possibly
    dialog boxes) for the menus and parameter screens.  This would
    eliminate the kludgey way you have to run xfractint inside an
    xterm for it to work.  It also eliminates the kludgey function key
    support stuff in xfractint currently.

    The DOS related code hasn't even been compiled; it was just
    migrated there from other files/functions as I noticed it instead
    of deleting it.  Eventually we want "DOS drivers" to handle that
    environment.

    You'll see various things like ##FIXME## or ##AUTOCONF##.  These
    are notes I made to myself while changing things to remind me to
    go back and fix some issue relating to platform portability
    (usually the ##FIXME##s are of this nature) or some issue that is
    related to platform configuration that should be handled by GNU
    autoconf.  (Is autoconf available for Mac and does it make any
    sense there?  You can always manually edit config.h if you don't
    have autoconf, but that is for gurus only I think.)

    I haven't gone through the code and replaced all the wacky DOSisms
    like weird 'common area' memory allocation and stuff like that.
    I've just left the xfractint solution in place, which works.
    You'll want to remove these DOSisms in the 32-bit porting work.

    I haven't removed all the near/far crap.  The header files just
    #define these away for now, so they should just all be removed
    from the code just to make it clear that we don't give a rat's ass
    about this under a flat memory model.  Otherwise, leaving them in
    but #define'd away will just cause confusion for future
    contributors.

    I spent a lot of time thinking about the best migration path for
    the fractint code from where we are now to fancy GUI enabled
    environments and so on.  Please don't dismiss my choices with some
    discussion on this list ;-).

    There is a way to evolve the source base into a position where we
    can do all I/O as events instead of polling like is done now.
    (xfractint fakes out the polling routine by checking for events
    inside the polling routine, but this is kludgey.)  The big
    implications of leaving behind polling are:

    Code that calls 'keypressed()' needs to have its control flow
    reworked.  Surprisingly this isn't a large number of places,
    but its sprinkled around more than in a few places.  The
    easiest way to find them all is to #ifdef out keypressed() and
    look for all the places where the compile breaks ;-).

    For the DOS DPMI environment, an interrupt handling routine
    needs to be written to post events to an internal event queue
    based on user input (keyboard, mouse, etc.).  I can't believe
    that someone hasn't already done this under a GPL like
    license.  We should be able to steal code for this, not have
    to write it.  If it does have to be written, I'm not the one
    for that job as this is too far afield from my core expertise
    (DOS interrupt handlers).

    All the changes in this tar file/diff are 'infrastructure'
    changes.  They are preparing the groundwork for the Mac port and
    a 32-bit port and a DirectX port and an improved X11 port and
    so-on.

I really hope this is useful to Tim and the Mac port folks.  (Sorry, I
forgot your name!)  Please lets try and reuse what I've done so far
since its like 70% finished and unfortunately my free time kinda
evaporated since I took a full-time job which has prevented me from
finishing it before you folks took up the torch.  In particular,
please ask me questions if there is something I've done that doesn't
make sense or you're confused about my design choices.  My goals for
this effort were to make the minimal amount of changes to xfractint in
order to implement an abstract driver base, from which other ports
to other window systems (I had X11 and Win32/GDI Win32/DirectX in mind
specifically) could be done much more easily.  I also wanted to
improve the quality of the X11 port along the way, using that as my
testbed 'driver', since that's my most readily available compilation
environment and the graphics environment with which I'm most
familiar.

The guts of the driver-specific code is all in the d_*.[hc] files.
- --
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    ``Ain't it funny that they all fire the pistol,
      at the wrong end of the race?''--PDBT
          <http://www.thewho.net>

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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 22:10:31 -0600
From: "Tim Wegner" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: (fractdev) initial stab at implementing drivers in fractint available

Rich wrote:

> OK, I've put two files in my FTP area that you'll want to look at;
> <ftp://ftp.xmission.com/pub/users/l/legalize/fractals/> contains:
>

OK, I'll have a look, and try to figure out how to merge the v20 no-
integer source.

I'll get that source up soon. This weekend was a marathon of
meetings.

Tim



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Date: Tue,  9 Nov 1999 18:54:25 -0800
From: tim gilman <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: (fractdev) initial stab at implementing drivers in fractint available

> [e-mail] (Phil McRevis) wrote:
> (on 11/7/99 at 6:19 PM)
> OK, I've put two files in my FTP area that you'll want to look at;
> <ftp://ftp.xmission.com/pub/users/l/legalize/fractals/> contains:
>
> xfractint-19.61.66-diffs.txt
> xfractint-experimental.tar

I'll check these out..

>     (Is autoconf available for Mac and does it make any sense there?)

Nope, no autoconf for the Mac.. It's all brute force.

>     There is a way to evolve the source base into a position where we
>     can do all I/O as events instead of polling like is done now.

The harder part is moving away from how closely coupled Fractint's state
is to the GUI.  Even GUI-less, the engine is still expecting certain
input during certain states (pressing Return/ESC in the Tab-info screen,
for example), which is a thorough pain in the bum.

>   The easiest way to find them all is to #ifdef out keypressed() and
>   look for all the places where the compile breaks ;-).

Ah, the sore-thumb philosophy of porting!

> I really hope this is useful to Tim and the Mac port folks.  (Sorry, I
> forgot your name!)  Please lets try and reuse what I've done so far
> since its like 70% finished and unfortunately my free time kinda
> evaporated since I took a full-time job which has prevented me from
> finishing it before you folks took up the torch.  In particular,

I'll definitely take a look, and work from the latest efforts.  Getting
the Mac port up and running has granted me some familiarity with the
source base, and some of its more interesting portability problems.

I'll post questions as they come up...

=- Tim Gilman
[e-mail]



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Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 08:41:49 -0700
From: Phil McRevis <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: (fractdev) initial stab at implementing drivers in fractint available

In article <[e-mail]>,
    tim gilman <[e-mail]>  writes:

> >     (Is autoconf available for Mac and does it make any sense there?)
>
> Nope, no autoconf for the Mac.. It's all brute force.

The modifications I made don't use autoconf yet, there are only place
holders for variables and the like where autoconf should probe the
platform for reasonable defaults.

Isn't the new MacOS a variant of unix?  Do you have unix-like
utilities available?  gcc? make? bourne shell?  If you have a
unix-like environment, autoconf should come up without difficulty.

> The harder part is moving away from how closely coupled Fractint's state
> is to the GUI.  Even GUI-less, the engine is still expecting certain
> input during certain states (pressing Return/ESC in the Tab-info screen,
> for example), which is a thorough pain in the bum.

Yeah, what they did for the X11 port was to deal with the event queue
whenever a routine was called that polled for input.  Fractint polls
for input often enough that this is a reasonable place to have event
queue management.  However, I think fractint can be moved to an event
input model without a massive rewrite.  Obviously code will change,
but there are really only a few places where input is polled in the
middle of a computation.  This is because fractint abstracted most of
the fractal types into a parameterized engine.  The odd men out (from
memory) are IFS, L-system, 'ant', 'lorenz' and a few other fractal
types.  Most of the fractal types go through the engine, so its only
one place to change for most fractal types.

> >   The easiest way to find them all is to #ifdef out keypressed() and
> >   look for all the places where the compile breaks ;-).
>
> Ah, the sore-thumb philosophy of porting!

For jobs like these, I found that emacs really does improve my
productivity.  This is because you're making regular expression type
changes to the source code.  Also M-x next-error in emacs is a nice
way to navigate through the massive compiler errors you get when
taking the #ifdef approach.  MS visual studio has something similar,
but I actually prefer the emacs one.  Switching between source files
in studio still requires me to leave the keyboard and go to the mouse.
There are keyboard equivalents, but they just aren't as handy as the
ones I already know.

> I'll definitely take a look, and work from the latest efforts.  Getting
> the Mac port up and running has granted me some familiarity with the
> source base, and some of its more interesting portability problems.

I am interested in hearing of any problems that the Mac has where you
think they might be particular to the Mac.
- --
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    ``Ain't it funny that they all fire the pistol,
      at the wrong end of the race?''--PDBT
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Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 20:57:32 -0600
From: Tim Wegner <[e-mail]>
Subject: WX Windows as a platform?

Tim G. and all,

I had assumed that using the GTK toolkit would be the way to go
for a portable Fractint, because it supports C and has been ported
to Windows, so we could probably have essentially one set of
sources for Linux and Windows. But after asking several of my
Python guru friends at work, they said that WXWindows is a much
better way to go because it is much more platform independent. It
has ports to the Mac also. Tim G., do you know about this?

Check out:

http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~wxxt/

and

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smart/wxwin/

The downside is that this toolkit uses C++ and not C. At least I
think that is a downside :-) Of course if we wanted, the main non-
GUI sources could still be in C.

Make a note that my email address is now [e-mail]. I
will kill [e-mail] soon.

Tim



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Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 23:08:48 -0500
From: "Damien M. Jones" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: WX Windows as a platform?

Tim,

 - The downside is that this toolkit uses C++ and not C. At least I
 - think that is a downside :-)

LOL--that's not a downside, that actually makes some things easier. :)

 - Of course if we wanted, the main non-GUI sources could still be in C.

Given the existing codebase that is in plain C, that's probably a good
idea. Mixing C and C++ is easy.

Damien M. Jones   \\
[e-mail]  \\  Fractalus Galleries & Info:
                    \\  http://www.fractalus.com/

Please do not post my e-mail address on a web site or
in a newsgroup.  Thank you.

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Date: Tue, 07 Dec 1999 22:54:18 -0600
From: Tim Wegner <[e-mail]>
Subject: Change of policy to release all patches?

I've been reading "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric
Raymond. It's about the implications of freeware and open source,
and is quite provocative. Not to mention a good read.

One of his points is that open source projects should try to get as
many users and developers involved as possible. Therefore he
advocates releasing "early and often". Believe it or not, there were
intense times when Linus Torvalds released Linux kernels more
than once a day!

The pace of fractint development has slowed way down for a variety
of reasons, but it still goes on. The developer group (which includes
some users) sees incremental changes every few days or as often
as not these days every few weeks. But the public sees a release
only every year or so.

A few years ago we followed Eric's philosophy somewhat.  The
developer releases weren't public but the were accessible to some
very active artists and a larger group of developers, so each patch
would get an immediate user workout. These artists are now
spreading their attention among more pieces of software and are
not as active with fractint (this is understandable as far as I am
concerned) and some artists and developers have left compuserve.
It is no longer reasonable to expect developers and artist/users to
be compuserve members.

I've floated similar ideas to what I'm proposing below in the past, so
I hope I'm not being repetitive, but this is more radical. If we can
reach a consensus, I'd like to move on this right away.

What if we simply posted the source patches and developer
executables in a public place. They would be marked as developer
patch versions.

Raymond claims it is absolutely essential to get as many users
(and developers) testing as possible to fix bugs and accelerate
development. Users could still download the last stable release if
they didn't want to be on the "bleeding edge".

I favour trying this. I don't see that we have anything to lose, given
the current pace of development. Anyone have a contrary view?

The reasons against it in the past were to avoid a proliferation of
versions and extra support work for us. We'd request that these
versions only be uploaded by people who agree to keep the posted
version current. We would not promise to provide support (though
the larger community could) but we would receive bug reports.

I'm also advocating changing our source license (after an
contacting the original developers) to one of the standard open
source licenses. We discussed that a bit here already. I haven't
heard any real objection other than the obligation to contact past
authors. Quite frankly our current "license" is so unclear and badly
worded I don't think it means much anyway, so I don't see a big
obstacle to changing the license. Probably within a year or two the
code will all be rewritten anyway. The bulk of our existing code was
written by a relatively small group of people most of whom I can
reach. The license is a separate issue. We could make the
developer versions public now and take some time to change the
license.

We are up to 2000 patch 02  (two patches since  version 20.0 was
released) and we haven't discussed them here. Part of the reason
is this list isn't really private.  One reason I am proposing this
policy change is that if we don't have a policy to make all patches
public, it will be very hard to get the focus of development at least
partly on this list. Compuserve is a comfortable,  private place for a
small number of us, but it restricts us tremendously to have the
focus only there.

Of course alternatively I could boot you all out and manually
approve subscriptions <grin!> I think I would rather throw this to the
wind and make the executable and source patch fully public, and
continue let anyone subscribe to this list. I haven't publicly
promoted this list, but it has always been open to anyone. There
are 35 subscribers at the moment, and I'd say I know about 12 or
so of you. (You're all welcome or I wouldn't be posting this
message :-))

Comments are solicited from anyone!

Tim


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Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1999 18:11:27 -0700
From: Phil McRevis <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Change of policy to release all patches?

Tim, it all sounds good to me.  Go ahead and modify the license and
open up the floodgates of distribution ;-).
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Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 21:03:21 -0500
From: DeRobertis <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Change of policy to release all patches?

Great idea! How about setting up anon. cvs and a public development mailing
list?

That way, anyone who wants them has the latest sources.



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Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1999 19:43:19 -0700
From: Phil McRevis <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Change of policy to release all patches?

In article <l03130312b474be49d311@[207.172.49.96]>,
    DeRobertis <[e-mail]>  writes:

> Great idea! How about setting up anon. cvs and a public development mailing
> list?

XMission can host a CVS anonymous repository.
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Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 17:41:24 -0600
From: "Paul N. Lee" <[e-mail]>
Subject: The Essential Guide to Open Source

(Source: SunWorld)

Sunworld dives into the free software and open source communities to
compile an essential list of annotated pointers.

      http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=200895

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Date: Fri, 24 Dec 1999 16:25 0000
From: [e-mail]
Subject: open source resource

Hi folks,

  Take a look over at http://www.sourceforge.net who seem to be
offering free services (CVS, listserv, archives and more) for open
source developers.  What do you think? Any good as a new home for
fractint development?

It'd put it in the sights of a lot of programmers methinks.

Cheers, and merry Xmas and an uneventful y2k rollover to
everyone!
         Robin.



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Date: Fri, 24 Dec 1999 11:24:49 -0700
From: Phil McRevis <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: open source resource

Its interesting, but what is their track record?  Currently I can set
up a CVS server and mailing list and FTP site and web site for
fractint all with XMission for no extra money on my part.  I know XM's
track record (excellent) and know the president personally.  So, that
seems like a useful resource, but I personally would feel more
comfortable setting up additional resources like a CVS server, etc.,
on XMission.  I am not the only developer, obviously, so a consensus
should be reached before making any final decisions.  Also, I would
defer to Tim's preference.
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Date: Sat, 25 Dec 1999 13:19:02 -0800
From: tim gilman <[e-mail]>
Subject: Gone for a while.

Soup Stoners,

I'm gone on vacation, to London for the next 4 weeks.  Until them, have
fun with Fractint and Happy New Year!

=- Tim Gilman



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Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2000 20:51:32 -0600
From: Tim Wegner <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: open source resource

Rich said:

> but I personally would feel more
> comfortable setting up additional resources like a CVS server, etc.,
> on XMission.  I am not the only developer, obviously, so a consensus
> should be reached before making any final decisions.  Also, I would
> defer to Tim's preference.

I didn't realize that we could extend the services we have with
xmission. I looked at sourceforge today and saw a lot to like. The
best thing about it is that they have user-controlled software so
everything can be managed without intervention on their part. I also
liked the ability to have a permanent email address to avoid the
nuisance I am going through right now changing my email.

 I always hate to bother the xmission folks because I know I am
getting a free service. But on the other hand, I don't think we have
demanded a lot from them and been too much of a nuisance.

We could use a CVS repository, a modest web site, and an FTP
site. As long as spanky.triumf.ca is active, we don't need an
extensive user-oriented site, just enough to support developers. Of
course that could change if spanky every goes away.

If you are willing to get us extended services from xmission, and
you don't think this is asking too much, I agree that this would be
better than sourceforge. I feel better with you around to give support
when we are getting started. Wouldn't we need shell accounts at
xmission?

The other resource we have is that Damien Jones has offerred
space on hist server for FTP and a web page. I was intending to
register the fractint.org domain and have it point to fractalus. I was
reconsidering that when I looked at sourceforge today. Damien
does not want to set up CVS.

Tim


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End of fractdev-digest V1 #26
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