Funny thing is I hated vi 23 years ago and I hate vi today too. :)
Me too ;-) I use nano when I must, otherwise Kate is a wonderful tool.
Sounds as though you are offering to host final binary packages for Slackware. Do I understand correctly?
Yes.
I have a small personal web site and don't have the bandwidth or capacity to host an off site build process or hosting binary packages. I considered that particular challenge when I posted my web page for this project but don't have an answer.
I'd both host and build if you like, but it sounds like it may not be necessary. I guess if I have time I might enable Slackware autobuilds anyway sometime in the future.
I need to ensure this build process succeeds here locally without issues before moving to the next step of hosting automatic builds. We are progressing forward, albeit at a slow pace. There just seems to be no fast way of getting through this.
You are correct and taking the right approach. Slow and steady beats fast and sloppy any day.
There are many Slackers who could help, but they have to volunteer. Pure Slackers tend to be much like pure Debians --- stuck in their own little command line world and ambivalent toward improvements. I have used Slackware many years and recently Debian and have seen this behavior among the purists.
I can understand; this has caused me lots of grief over the years, and is one reason among many why I eventually ended up using Ubuntu. I understand the reasoning to some extent, but many people do not need the level of stability and security that is promoted with that approach, especially not with the heavy price tag attached. Some do though, so the distributions continue to thrive.
This is a huge project. I wish I could encourage other Slackers to get involved. There are some really sharp Slackers out there who could move this project faster than me. My web site stats show Slackers are visiting my web page devoted to this project. Yet nobody is offering to help. I am hoping that perhaps when I get the basics rolling and confirm all the packages at least build, that then some of those people might become more interested when they see the improvements you've added to 3.5.10. Hence my interest in parsing the svn logs to create a more readable change log for use as a marketing tool.
I know the feeling; I have been snubbed repeatedly by OpenSUSE folks mentioning that, in effect, "Our version of KDE3.5 works just fine and we won't change it". Oh well, it's open source and if I want to pull in their patches I can still do so. ;-) Meanwhile I'll build the packages for some other distribution like Fedora that has a more open attitude.
Possibly part of the lack of interest is the Slackware maintainer declared 3.5.x dead and the die-hards are going to follow blindly. Most people are under the illusion that qt3 is a problem. They do not know that you are building the interface required to adapt to qt4. I think if more people knew that there might be more interest in 3.5.x.
Yeah, but it will be many months before it even compiles the core apps with Qt4, and many more months before it becomes usable I'm afraid. More KDE/Qt developers would be of great help here, but at this moment I am the only developer on this project with the required skill set.
My (hopeful) attitude right now is "if we build it they will come."
Important is I need to get to the point where all of these packages build without incident AND I am using them on a daily basis. If I am eating my own dog food then that might encourage people to become involved.
Sounds like a plan.
I appreciate what you mentioned previously about how much you have to do at your end. With the current response among Slackers, at moments I wonder whether all the work I am doing is only for me. :) Well, if that is the case, this won't be the first time a person scratched his or her own itch. If others benefit from my work without helping then great but I get no less than I seek. If I had even rudimentary C++ skills I would be trying to patch things like crazy.
Understood and appreciated. ;-)
In summary, let's proceed with all of this one day at a time. Otherwise I'll overload!
OK!
Darrell
Thanks again for all you have done thus far!
Tim