[Savannah-hackers] Re: [Savannah] kit want to be a GNU package

[Henrik Abelsson]

On 9 Apr 2001, Hugo Gayosso wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
[...]
> 
> We have received a request to evaluate your software to be included in
> the GNU Project.
> 
> Thank you very much for your offer.
>
 
Hello! I'm very sorry for the late reply - i've been on a easter trip with
family.

I'm not sure you'll want kit in the state it's now - but
i'm willing to change what's needed to accommodate GNU needs.. if you
guys think that this could be a useful contribution. If not, i'll just
merrily code away myself :)

There's a couple of evil things that kit does (to save you the time of
discovering them yourselves)

* It depends on the horrible Qt toolkit (soon the gui will be cleanly
abstracted away from the protocol implementation, so alternative frontends
could be written without too much pain). 
* It's poorly documented. Read: hardly anything.
* Written in C++. While not that evil in itself, C might have been nicer.
* Client code is fairly messy, the server is a bit better.
* Only database plugin written yet is for mysql. 
* Doesnt interact with the rest of the system much.
* Client isnt a proper autoconf/automake package (i used an automatically
generated template from kdevelop after i couldnt get automake to work
reliably with Qt myself)
* No command line interface(s).
* No config file implemented for server - lot of values are hardcoded.

KiT uses free software, but it's not the "usual" gnu set of free
software. Qt vs GTK+ and mySQL vs PostgreSQL. Different databases is
very easy to support (you dont even need to recompile the server) but the
client is fairly dependant on Qt still - even the parts that arent
directly GUI related. But like i said above.. it's my firm intention to
fix that and separate the GUI and code. (it's the Right Thing)

It's still fairly early in kit development so
dependancies/configuration/compilation and usability/interface will
probably be at best problematic. [I'm not sure what state projects that
apply to be GNUified usually are - is this too early? ]


 > We will complete this evaluation as soon as possible, but the
team
of > evaluators is made out of volunteers, so sometimes this could mean
> weeks.
> 
Of course. 

> During the course of the evaluation you might be contacted by one or
> more software evaluators asking you different kind of questions, or
> maybe even making suggestions.
> 
The more the better. I'm sure some help might be needed to get this to
work...


> The last word about your softwares becoming part of the GNU Project or
> not is from Richard M. Stallman himself, we just help him clear
> technical and licensing issues.
> 
The big man himself? Oh. 

> Please send an URL to get the source code, and licensing terms.
>

Homepage:
http://abelsson.com/kit/
Server package:
http://www.abelsson.com/kit/kitserver-0.1.0.tar.gz
Client:
http://www.abelsson.com/kit/kitclient-0.1.0.tar.gz

GPLed server and client. Soon-to-be-separated protocol implementation
LesserGPL. (or should it be GPLed aswell?)

You can contact me either at address@hidden or 
AIM) AbelssonH or ICQ) 441330 or KiT) henrik (on server luke.styrke.com)

Cheers,
-henrik

> - -- 
> Hugo Gayosso
> GNU Software Evaluators
> Coordinator
> 
> http://www.gnu.org
> http://wildebeest.myip.org
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org
> 
> iD8DBQE60j7eMNObVRBZveYRAn6zAKCTBzcmcf363qjCtZHoMWxAYac3YgCeJyLK
> gu2m1Sdbc7ljiD00vFJNWtY=
> =NZPS
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> 
>