From:	geneb AT web DOT wa DOT net
Date:	Thu, 11 Sep 1997 11:54:02 -0700 (PDT)
To:	Joseph Morris <b52g AT usa DOT net>
cc:	opendos AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: Are you sure you _want_ the sources?
In-Reply-To:	<ww03-BikHzi2751@netaddress.usa.net>
Message-ID:	<Pine.LNX.3.93.970911113746.2396B-100000@web.wa.net>
MIME-Version:	1.0

> The sources are terribly messy, and very hard to understand.
Understatement of the century.

> They are all tied into the legendary VersionControlSystem.
> Gene will be an old man by the time all these have been made into a
> format useful to anyone else.
If it was up to me, I'd thumb my nose at novell and dump the whole twisted
little VCS of theirs on the net, pack up the whole directory tree (all
70MB+ of it), dump THAT on the net, and scream, HERE! YOU FIGURE THIS
NASTY MESS OUT!.... I never thought I'd see a few thousand lines of
makefiles processed *before* it actually got to the makefile for whatever
package I was building at the time.  Evil.  Pure Evil.  

I do think it would be easier to extract the "normal" utilities from that
mess, but it would still be a nightmare with anything that used RASM86
binaries. (hint, RASM86 is so old, it has not clue what a subdirectory is)

> 
> An in-joke at Caldera is "When are you going to re-write it then?"
> which is the usual comment made when someone begins editing a utility.
> 
When someone asks. :)  (Then again, I've been so buried at work, I've not
touched the GEM code in a while...)

> So there might be some anguish if the sources _were_ suddenly 
> released..
*some*?!  Try "undeniable" or "unimaginable". ;)
g.

- Raw text -