# To subscribers of the xforms list from Peter S Galbraith <GalbraithP@dfo-mpo.gc.ca> :
I've seen many messages lately about fixes going into the 0.89 tree
which will take much too long to migrate to commonly used Linux
distributions.
Another example: I was looking at the status of a Debian bug:
in which I'm asking the XFMail Debian maintainer to build against XForms
0.89 instead of 0.88. It turns out that XFMail maintainers are using
undocumented fl_fdesc variable which was in 0.88 but not in early 0.89
fixlevels. See:
http://slappy.org/pipermail/xfmail/2002-January/002883.html
I'd like to propose that T.C. and Steve find a few people they can trust
to build new updated binaries for various Linux architectures
(e.g. alpha, i386, ia64, m68k, powerpc, s390, sparc) as well as other
major OSes and upload them to ftp://ncmir.ucsd.edu/pub/xforms/
(I can do Linux/i386 as can many readers on this list)
A large percentage of the XForms user base would then have updated
libraries. Yes, it would be easy to accomplish this goal if XForms were
open-sourced. But is that _really_ going to happen? If it's not going
to happen, then why not at least try to update the binaries? I think
that the always imminent open-source release is hampering the
availability of updated binaries. Heck, even making the sources
available under a super restrictive license would be better than no
sources like now. At least we'd all have the same code base then.
Don't read this as a negative message regarding the not-happening
open-source release, see it as a call for updated binaries for all and
fewer bugs for mankind.
Comments?
Peter
_________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send the message "unsubscribe" to
xforms-request@bob.usuhs.mil or see
http://bob.usuhs.mil/mailserv/xforms.html
XForms Home Page: http://world.std.com/~xforms
List Archive: http://bob.usuhs.mil/mailserv/list-archives/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 01 2002 - 13:54:17 EDT