Re: THE problem with xconq (long)

["A. Rick Anderson" <arick at pobox dot com>]

At 06:20 AM 2/4/2002 -0800, Stan Shebs wrote:
>Ahem, I was never paid to work on Xconq.

My apologies.  You may remember the conversation that we had several years 
back when I was trying to get the guy doing the Yggdrasil Linux(R) distro 
to include XConq. At that time you agreed that the license for XConq was 
tainted by your work at the UofU, Apple and Cygnus.  From this comment, I 
incorrectly concluded that part of your work at these companies was 
supporting XConq.

> > Why would I want to ride
> > around on the weekends in a busted up, smoggy, diesel two-ton, when I can
> > cruise on an Electra-Glide?
>
>Heh, but as it turns out there is a whole subculture of automobile
>enthusiasts who do nothing but fix up old cars and drive them around.
>One of my coworkers owns two Ferraris, but spends considerable effort
>on restoring a Model T...

Not this cat.  Give me my Hog any day :-)  I gave up on 'C'ars because of 
the smell, smog, associated "s***" and PAIN!

>But the reality is that even you, as the most vociferous proponent
>of rewriting Xconq in Java, apparently can't be persuaded even to
>lift a finger to start on it.  If you won't do anything, what reason
>is there to believe anybody else will?

I've actually had several developers approach me and one or two 
collaborations going that subsequently died.  The killer each time has been 
the lack of a UI-type person.  I am a back-end kind-a-guy and I hate doing 
UI's with a passion.  Stan pointed out that a key technology risk on doing 
a Java port would be Java's graphic handling capability.  I haven't been 
willing (you're right, motivation) to learn enough UI stuff to get a simple 
Hello World up ... without which, getting all the back-end stuff up isn't 
terribly interesting.

The architecture of the simple prototypes folks have sent me had no hopes 
of scaling, so that's where things more or less stopped.

A Java port may or may not succeed, but it is apparent that the current 
C/List version most certainly isn't.