[Fwd: Re: [Gambas-user] Questions]

[Rob]

On Thursday 25 December 2003 12:07, Ken Schrock wrote:
> At least the Lindows method allows some "standard"
> They had 0.53 and now 0.62, which is only two 

I'd imagine that's just because Gambas is low on their priority 
list, even though Michael Robertson has made a point of 
mentioning it in interviews and stuff (if you search the 
developer part of their website, they actually recommend HBasic 
for VB developers even though I don't think they package that 
one.).  

Gambas only gets packaged as often as it does for Mandrake 
because it's important to my business for my clients to see how 
far along it's coming.  That's right, it benefits me, 
personally.  The fact that other people get to use it is just a 
happy coincidence, though I'll probably have to be still more 
diligent in packaging it when it finally gets accepted into 
contrib (in hopes that they'll make it part of the core distro.)

> Except for the 20 people on this list who always have the
> "current" one Most of the folks out in the real world got
> whatever version they got And it is hard as hell writing
> software for 100 possible versions

It seems to me that the two choices available to a programmer 
writing interpreted programs for the public are:

1. Write against the most recent stable version of your 
interpreter.  This doesn't apply to Gambas because the 1.0 
release (intended to be the stable one) doesn't exist yet.

2. Write against the most recent release.  With no stable Gambas 
release yet, this seems like the best option.  If the most 
recent release isn't available for your distro.... 
congratulations, you've just been promoted to maintainer! 

Seriously, that's the one and only reason I picked up the 
maintainer job for Mandrake.... I needed it and no one else was 
doing it.  That's the joy of free software.  Same with the 
documentation.  "Wow, having to go back and forth between Gambas 
and Acrobat Reader and the component explorer kinda sucks," one 
of my users said, so I started the wiki.  I bet if you ask any 
of the other guys on the list who have contributed code or 
resources, they're in the same boat.  It's not like anyone's 
paying us to do so, but we feel we will benefit if Gambas does 
well.  And my business will not collapse if Debian users can't 
run Gambas, since I have no Debian clients, though my partner's 
Lindows laptop is going to need a current Gambas release sooner 
or later and so I may be pressed into service at that time.

> Gambas needs...
> 1. A real "stable" version for people to work against

With the way the last few releases have looked I fully expect a 
1.0 release Real Soon Now(tm).

> 2. The ability to easily install on most major Linux distros

As with any free software project, that depends on volunteers.  
If you have RHE or Fedora or Suse or Lindows or Lycoris, build a 
package.  If you don't know how, but have a lot of money lying 
around, send me a hard disk with your pet distro preinstalled, 
throw in some packaging docs if it's not RPM-based, and I'll try 
to spend some time making it all work for you.

Alternatively, there's always the Loki installer, which I have 
never used.  But I'd be happy to learn how... if you would be 
happy to pay me to!  There are probably others on the list who 
would too.  Or you could do it yourself like the rest of us have 
when Gambas needed something we wanted.

> The "killer" would be a Win version

I think the cygwin version won't take too much longer, but I 
won't be contributing even though I think it's a good idea 
because I just have no Windows machines anymore.  I'd even be 
willing to take a stab on it by booting into the tiny unused 
win2k partition on my notebook, but again only if you or someone 
wanted to pay me to.

As for a 'native' Windows version, it would have a lot of 
differences from the Gambas we know because you'd need to write 
an OLE automation component to replace all the things you can't 
do with pipes in windows, and the resulting Gambas binaries 
couldn't be distributed because Gambas is GPL and there's no GPL 
Qt port for Windows.  I don't see this happening in the 
foreseeable future.

> Gambas is easy and powerful and logical
> It could be the oft promised but never delivered
> Holy grail of programming, a true cross platform development
> tool

I agree that it could be, though it wouldn't directly benefit me 
as I don't do Windows myself anymore, and I look forward to your 
contributions, code or otherwise, to this cause.  Perhaps as a 
start you could forward that non-working project you were 
mentioning to the list to help us debug it.

Rob