FreeGuide source layout (and SVN migration)

Christian and others have pointed out lots of problems with the source code layout in FreeGuide. The biggest problem is that each plugin has its own source tree which makes it very difficult to set up in an IDE like Eclipse. I knew it needed doing, and the other night I couldn’t sleep and I felt like making it happen. Since SVN is so much better than CVS for re-arranging source code (because you can move files and keep their history) and because sourceforge are now offering SVN, I decided the right thing to do would be to migrate to SVN before making the changes.

So far, I have managed to get all the source code to build from the command line (instructions here: freeguide-tv.sourceforge.net/dev/index.php/Build_from_SVN) and I’m working on making the Ant build work again, although there’s still a bit to do there.

My aim is for it to be extremely easy to start developing FreeGuide: just download or check out the source code, fire up your editor or IDE, compile and run. That means FreeGuide needs to handle loading plugins from either JARs or directories (without being told which to do), and it needs to know where to look for its lib and doc directories if they are not specified.

Soon, it will Just Work. Then hopefully this will encourage more developers to get involved.

Meanwhile I’ve decided if I want to build up some momentum I need to balance my limited time between code and email, instead of just fire-fighting the email all the time. Some individual users may not get their questions answered, which I hate, but in the end it would be worse if the project lost interest and faded away. I need to inject some excitement!

Letter to Linux Journal

Dear LJ,

I’d like to start by saying thank you very much for the years of quality articles and features that your magazine has provided. I eagerly await the arrival of each month’s copy as it jets over the Atlantic to my doorstep. LJ has always provided detailed and informative articles on topics both mainstream and more quirky, but always with the deeply technical edge no other magazine or web site I have found can provide.

I am writing because the April issue proved a grave disappointment. Gone were the technical articles and gone were the interesting projects. In their place I found a plethora of opinion pieces most of which provided no new insight into their subject that I could not have found on Slashdot or OSNews, along with some beginner’s articles on how to install a couple of PHP applications. Even the Doc had nothing interesting to say about the yesterday’s-news trying-to-be-trendy refrain of “blogs, wikis and podcasts” which seemed to be repeated several times on each page. The articles which did contain decent technical content (notably “Work the shell” and “Remote Temperature Monitoring with Linux”) were swamped beneath the river of fluff through which I found myself wading.

When Nicholas Petreley wrote his first uninformed and ill-judged “/etc/rant” I felt I could let it pass since it was just one page of an excellent magazine, but now that his style of writing – opinion rather then content – seems to be spreading to the rest of the magazine, I feel the need to express my disquiet at what he has been doing with this column.

/etc/rant is an article put aside each month for criticising free software projects. The fact that an editor would allow such an article to exist, let alone write it himself, displays a profound and worrying misunderstanding of the community to which he is trying to contribute. Free software projects live and breath through encouragement and just plain getting on with it. As a member of this community, the right way to express dissatisfaction with the way something is being done is to contribute to the project, or (if necessary) launch or encourage an equivalent project that does things differently. By criticising from the sidelines Mr. Petreley reveals himself to be an outsider – as a writer a more appropriate way to contribute to the community (and hence form a useful part of it) would be to praise and encourage projects which are doing the right thing, rather than sucking energy out of valuable and innovative projects which have involved large amounts of volunteer effort such as GCJ and Gnome.

I never thought I would say it, but if this continues I will be cancelling my subscription to LJ. Sadly, I don’t think I’ll ever find another magazine that will reach the level of quality I have come to expect from you.

Yours sincerely,

Andy Balaam

Linux Journal slides

jdub notes that Linux Journal is going to the dogs. If the only change were to the back page I could get over it and move on, but so far I am about half way through the latest issue (March 2006?) and I’ve read nothing but opinion pieces.

I can get all the rantish uninformed opinions I need on OSNews. When I want quality technical articles written by people at the top of their field which cover hardcore problem solving and creative projects, then I turn to LJ. That is why I pay REAL MONEY for a paper journal like this. Because it has substance.

If I have to cancel my subscription, where should I go?

Donation

Forgot to mention: I got my first non-anonymous donation to the FreeGuide project – Steve Fuller sent in a donation along with a request (but with no implication of linkage ;). Thanks Steve! It never ceases to amaze me how Americans will donate to projects like this. My feeling about British people (certainly myself) is that I would always think if I were going to donate to something I’d make it something “important” like Christian Aid, but actually I do think Free Software is important too (actually in order to achieve some of the same goals that Christian Aid have…). The idea of mixing philanthropy with self-interest, which seems to be natural to Americans, can feel a little dirty to us Europeans, but actually that is stupid.

Anyway, enough philosophy: Steve, your donation will be used to buy myself something nice (e.g. a GameCube game or some online poker money) and it has significantly encouraged me to get stuck back into FreeGuide development (see the previous post … guilt is rising). You never know, it might even subconsciously encourage me to get to your specific feature request sooner ;).

(The feature request was allowing favourites to match on programme descriptions and other, more specialised fields. I am wondering about how to keep the UI simple for this, but it should be do-able given some time to implement it.)

FreeGuide update

I have very little time for FreeGuide at the moment. Part of the problem is that there are lots of boring bugs to fix instead of interesting new features, and it’s hard to motivate myself to get into it. I am really keen on making it Just Work every time, but since other people have been working on the code and quite a lot of it is unfamiliar, it’s a lot of work to work out where to look to fix a problem.

Hopefully when I’ve purged this poker thing from my system I will find time to get into the latest TODO list. At the moment all my FreeGuide time is going into trying to keep up with helping people on the mailing lists. Joe Blow is doing a fantastic job of providing an initial response to lots of mails, but often people are encountering weird bugs that need a developer to get involved. It would be great if some of the other people involved in development were able to help out, but it’s quite a thankless task, and takes away time from developing…

It’s frustrating when quite a few of the bugs we have are things I fixed in a previous version that have crept in with new implementations of existing functionality. It’s taken ages to get FreeGuide stable, and recently it seems to have taken some steps backwards. My feeling is that the percentage of people who are able to install it with no problems and download listings straight away has gone down considerably. I _really_ want to fix this.

That’s why the TODO list for 0.10.4 is pure bugs. We need to make it _work_ before we make it do new stuff. Otherwise people are just going to walk away.

Saying that, the addition of a new experimental vertical listings view by Christian is really exciting. I haven’t even found time to try it out yet: I must examine my priorities. FreeGuide has always been my “main” project but I have been neglecting it as time presses in.

The Boy (as I call him) is doing well and has slept well the last 2 nights, giving us a break from the all-over-body pain of extended tiredness. If this is part of a trend towards more sleep, I may get more time to make FreeGuide better.