Re: [j-users] [j-devel] J-the-editor

[Jan-Wijbrand K. <jw...@n-...>]

> On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 4:27 PM, Marcin Tustin <mm...@ze...> wrote:
>> What does it need in the way of maintenance?

On Tue, 2 Sep 2008 17:07:09 -0700, "David Martin" <dav...@gm...>
wrote:
> Regarding what it needs for maintenance, at a minimum it doesn't build
> out-of-the-box using latest versions of Java. At least, I downloaded
> the source and tried to build via ant, using JDK 1.6, and was
> unsuccessful.

Exactly. Newer Java versions have seen the light of the day since the
latest offical release and I couldn't get J compiled yesteryday on a clean
Ubuntu where I installed sun-java6-jdk and did a ./configure; make; make
install. Compilation using sun-java5-jdk appeared to succeed, but then J
wouldn't start, crashing with some stackoverflow error.

Anyway, IMHO, codebases in active use need maintenance.

> Regarding the 3 options, I think there's a fourth, which is to fork
> and reimplement. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong
> with the existing code base, but a lot of time has passed, and there
> may be some interesting language options that weren't available 5
> years ago.
> 
> Having said that, I'm afraid I can't really be involved at this time,
> much as this would normally interest me. I'm effectively working two
> jobs these days, so I simply don't have the cycles to spare.

I quickly thought about such a fourth option as well, however being
involved a couple community driven open-source projects I know one thing:
you have to start simple and with a low ambition levels to get anything
done. It is just too easy to find yourself tangled in long and interesting
discussions about how thing *could* be or *should* be without getting some
actual code out.

For me the first low-ambition step would be: get J compiled and running
again on a fresh Ubuntu install. This is something I can realistically
speaking try to do. Let's share these eepxeriences on the mailinglist and
see if this can get any ball (however small or big the ball actually is)
rolling.


Thanks for you replies!!
regards,
jw

--
Jan-Wijbrand Kolman
jw...@n-...