Message-ID: <C1E9A9C637E2D31196100050DA3C15410F8EF0@FRUITMACHINE>
From: Shawn Hargreaves <shawnh AT climax DOT co DOT uk>
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Mother Novell, DJGPP, and Emacs: Friends?
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:43:09 +0100 
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Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

>>>> That would be a good idea for all3932 (latest Allegro) also, as 
>>>> it is essentially 4.0.  It has been stable for months.
>>>
>>> Then why isn't it on SimTel?
>> 
>> The package maintainer (Shawn Hargreaves) seems to have abandoned
>> Allegro for some reason; he isn't even on the mailing lists anymore.

I'm hard at work in a new job at Climax Studio's new Brighton office,
writing a Playstation 2 racing game. All good stuff, and it's going
really well at the moment, but after sitting in front of a computer
all day, I don't have so much enthusiasm for doing more coding in my
free time :-) My involvement with Allegro is limited to when I'm in
between other projects, or when I'm bored with my day job, as was the
case through most of last year.

Don't worry, though, because there are plenty of other highly 
compentent people who are still hard at work on improving Allegro,
with an active mailing list and CVS repository. The reason it hasn't
been released as 4.0 is because there are still some things which
are known to not work at all, which is in my opinion not acceptable
for a major release, but in the meantime anyone who wants to can use
the unstable version from http://www.sunsite.auc.dk/allegro/wip.html
(currently 3.9.32, I think).

I don't see any problem with uploading that to Simtel if someone cares
to do it, although the 3.12 stable release should probably be left
there as well. You really ought to discuss this with the more active
maintainers on the Allegro mailing list, though.

As far as djgpp usage is concerned, there isn't all that much
difference between 3.12 and 3.9.32: most of the changes are to do
with the addition of Linux, Windows, and BeOS support.

> Thats very strange, Allegro was his most succesful project, and IIRC 
> he was nominated for a free sosftware award (fsf.org)because of it..

I still lurk on the mailing lists, and I'm sure I'll get involved 
again at some point if my real life job gets less time consuming.
At the moment I'm having way too much fun playing around with the
PS2, though :-)


-- 
Shawn Hargreaves
Lead Programmer
Climax Studios Brighton