Libpnd And Pnd-File .. The Position. I Can Add Drama Too!


skeezix

Internal Development
Joined
Mar 11, 2003
Messages
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Website
www.codejedi.com
Man, I take a couple days to be on babysitting duty with my daughter, a 3 day vacation from things, and look what happens!
Oh the drama! (*theory* -- this is all just done to work everyone up, to make Pandora - The Musical, sell better.)

libpnd and the PND-file system are open source, and I hope they will some day be of sufficient quality and value to be adopted by other Linux distributions. It is a possibly awesome thing with the potentially to be 100% ignored by everyone, or could someday be cool. A lot of libpnd is Pandora-specific, though perhaps I should more clearly delimit the pnd-file stuff and the Pandora-stuff, as already a couple other distributions (non-Pandora related) are looking at pnd-files. A lot of it was built while the sand shifted beneath our feet, and some of it was done quick.. but it is Good Stuff. It works, it works well, and once released, and we see usage patterns in the users, talented people all over will rework and rework it to be something wicked I am sure. We should count our community lucky to have people like dflemstr in it.. and Vimacs, notaz, djwillis, etc :) And nice chaps like ED who can't andle such explosions as this without blushing :) (And yes, I know, all of libpnd could be written as a 10 line sh-script, a 1 line perl script, a 17 line python job, or a 1 character APL job, but I wanted it easily bindable, so its a big monolithic set of apps, deal with it!)

(Why does this sound like something you say at a funeral?)

For my part, theres far too much invested to let the project fail now; this puppy is going to damned well ship, and have a pretty decent OS in it :) Craig etc have a lot of financial investment, and blood and sweat; we devs don't have the financial burden and stress that way, but we have the blood and sweat part, thats for sure (looks at Djwillis and notaz). So fear not people, this is all going on, don't worry. We're a responsible lot :)

But here we have vimacs, who is beyond skilled and a valued team member, and a friend; a lot of the OS has been hacked out in IRC as we sit about discussing things, etc; I have logged it all (haha, take that!), plus I keep the wiki; I've got the history here people :) Craig keeps his nose out of the channel, lets us do our magic there; hes got the store to run, etc. He keeps out of our way. Maybe Craig knows the value Vimacs brings, or maybe Vimacs is just a name he knows is helping out but not to what extent. Or maybe craig lost track of things. I'm not here to apologize for anyone, or to speak for anyone. What I'm saying is.. Vimacs is too good to let go, but he makes his own decisions. (When you think about it, the OS was built by djwillis, notaz, myself, vimacs, ED, cpasjuste, and others. But Mike alone built the hardware? Damn!)

1) libpnd and PND-files are going on, in Pandora and outside of Pandora. They're not vanishing, people. My email inbox has damned exploded!
2) Vimacs is valued; he is also a friend. Hopefully this shit sorts out. (Don't ban me for that word, for if ever an appropriate term that is it!)
3) DAmnit, if he cancelled, I will fly to .de and get him one myself. He goddamned deserves it, whethor he wants it or not, and whether anyone else wants him to or not. Seriously, I will save my pennies and get him one and shove it down his throat!

I'm in a tough spot; I ship things. I'm a pro, its what I do; I've also been building gadgets, software and the Internet for too many years, and know all about Teh Flamewars. And I'm a decent guy, I keep someones back, and Vimacs is a good man. But we ship, I have spoken.

4) In the end, Vimacs has assigned responsibility for his code to me (damn you Vimacs, you can fix your own bugs you bastard!); as my code will be LGPL (like it or not, we want people to be able to make commercial apps for PAndora, and thus they need libpnd to be available to them in that capacity; so here I sweat for countless hours so someone can sell _my work_. Thats what giving to the community means people!), his code will be LGPL as well.
5) I hope Craig, and Vimacs, and all that mess will cool over; I don't think Vimacs is angry per se, just disappointed; if he is really angry, I hope he forgives me .. but his code has to be LGPL. I'm glad I don't have to replace it .. I would have felt like a turd, a scalper, to do it, and wouldn't have done half the job ;)

Craig can be a nutter, and he knows it. He fosters it, thats why he wears that hat to amuse and scare children :) But you all knew it going in, its not like he wasn't always Craig.

jeff, fence-walker.

I do love the new meme .. "whats your order number?" ..

I'm not telling anyone. I want my production Pandora, my wife is already stealing my dev one!
 
I'm a long tme bswd guy (half my machines are still FreeBSD even :), so I have considered it. Still, as Pandora is Linux and most Linux is flag waving for GPL, I figured LGPL was a pretty good match for everything. I'd liek to trot out "we're busy enough, do I really weant to spend 10 daysmulling over licenses", but its not like you can change liceses easily later. So currently going LGPL route, but hell, I should just dual-license it :p

*grumble* I hate license-wars, its like rule-warring with Magiv the Gathering players ;)

jeff
 
I'm glad PND is staying in. It is really sad this business between Craig and Vimacs. Like you said we're so close to shipping and we've all got the same goal at heart, as devs you've all been working towards that same goal for so long. I hope that all gets sorted out.

Thanks again for all your work, ED's last video showed us the hotness of PND once more.
 
skeezix said:
I'm a long tme bswd guy (half my machines are still FreeBSD even :) , so I have considered it. Still, as Pandora is Linux and most Linux is flag waving for GPL, I figured LGPL was a pretty good match for everything. I'd liek to trot out "we're busy enough, do I really weant to spend 10 daysmulling over licenses", but its not like you can change liceses easily later. So currently going LGPL route, but hell, I should just dual-license it :p

*grumble* I hate license-wars, its like rule-warring with Magiv the Gathering players ;)

jeff

Well I do still have to give you credit for not GPLing it, that would be nasty. I suppose people can live with LGPL. I use Linux full time myself, never touched BSD, but I have a love/hate relationship with GPL. I believe that any full blown software should be considered for GPL, but that *libraries* should be licensed under something more... 'free'. Being required to make your entire program GPL just because one little library in it is is silly.
 
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skeezix said:
*grumble* I hate license-wars, its like rule-warring with Magiv the Gathering players ;)
jeff

Oi! I love rule-warring, especially in Magic the Gathering.
But license-wars... not so much.

Anyone wanna play a quick game of magic? And don't you dare put dmg on the stack!
 
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I agree Skeezix, well except for the fact that you entirely left out the guy who did the whole case design and keymat rubber design <_< That was allot more work than you think.

Anyway I hope Vimacs and Craig kiss and make up, or at least Vimacs considers continuing his work for the sake of the project even if he is mad at Craig.

Vimacs is a good coder, I can say good things about him, and he banned me once and called me some kind of name. I guess time wounds all heels.
 
Excellent news, Skeezix!

Thanks.. I like your dominant ways!
Put your foot down, and you tell them!


Edit:
Gruso - You're a funny mofo!
 
skeezix said:
GREAT POST HERE

Great post. I really admire the developers of any part of the Pandora (including you DaveC). They are the real deal, walk the walk, etc. Very awesome and I just wanted to express my thanks. I don't know how you put up with the provocative trolls... may you find more patience!
 
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DaveC said:
I agree Skeezix, well except for the fact that you entirely left out the guy who did the whole case design and keymat rubber design <_< That was allot more work than you think.

Anyway I hope Vimacs and Craig kiss and make up, or at least Vimacs considers continuing his work for the sake of the project even if he is mad at Craig.

Vimacs is a good coder, I can say good things about him, and he banned me once and called me some kind of name. I guess time wounds all heels.

Well, I also left out fatih and lots of people, but I didn't mean to be all inclusive or short anyone. Sorry :)

I have gone ot at length about th case .. theres a lot of good subtle stuff in there; its one of the best dpads ever, and I really like the sunken controls at the front (ie: how the SD cards dont' stick out, the volume knob is not accidentally hit by things in the pocket, etc.) Its little hidden details that will slip unnoticed by most people -- thats the best compliment you can get for a case design, when no one notices it ;)

jeff
 
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skeezix said:
Well, I also left out fatih and lots of people, but I didn't mean to be all inclusive or short anyone. Sorry :)

I have gone ot at length about th case .. theres a lot of good subtle stuff in there; its one of the best dpads ever, and I really like the sunken controls at the front (ie: how the SD cards dont' stick out, the volume knob is not accidentally hit by things in the pocket, etc.) Its little hidden details that will slip unnoticed by most people -- thats the best compliment you can get for a case design, when no one notices it ;)

jeff

That is ok I just saw the list of coders and the electronics guy and thought the one who put all of that tech into something useable should have been in that list as that is kind of a main aspect. It is no big deal though I was mostly just giving you a sarcastic but playful jab as a joke. I have been pretty silent through this whole project so I am easy to forget (I was mostly too busy working to post in forums :) )

I don't want any more negativity, the forums lately make me sad. Everything seems to turn into a bitchfest. So with that thanks for all of the great work on this and every project you do here (can't wait to get my mitts on a beta of Hatari :p )
 
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You're worrying about the license? Look at the code. The license is the least of your worries.
Once again: I like the idea, not the implementation.
 
Thank you so much, skeezix. My fears after reading through that thread were put to rest as soon as I read that Vimacs was letting you decide what to do... I've been here since the first days, and you're about as sensible a person as EvilDragon.

Also, I love this...

whatsyourorder.gif
 
zhasha said:
You're worrying about the license? Look at the code. The license is the least of your worries.
Once again: I like the idea, not the implementation.

ouch! ;)

Any particular problems?

ie: There are a number of hacky bits in there (what the heck, its free time and not much of it, and under a shifting OS and moving target :) , but the APIs and goals are good; I never said any particular bit is perfect ;)

The multilanguage handling will get improved post-release; the PXML.xml spec will get altered post-release (to be multi app aware and a long list of improvements), the whole emitter and app-exec mechanism will get merged and improved. The whole monolithic desing of pndnotifyd etc will probably stay, due to my trying to keep it all really obvious and simple, though big parts will get redone (move to dsbus, even though dbus is a big bloated thing, its hella lot more reliable than inotify for a lot of things). Really, the whole thing shoudl be a few lisp-like pything scripts, but that woudlnt' be bindable to anyones code, so its all straight boring C, very little C++, and all written to be obvious to anyone, so not fancy. The whole PXML parser needs a redo, too, while we're at it :)

But if theres any big bugs, please let me know; for design thoughts, please let me know so can mull things over for the future.

Course that said, you're welcome to fork and rewrite ... please do :) I've always said that day one, once we've shipped, peopel are welcome to replace every last bit of it, as long as the idea still works :)

(I do get a reasonable amount of criticism over it, but as is typical .. no one sends patches, cept dflemstr ;) Its easy to pick apart things, but patch away! It builds and runs on pretty much any modern linux, you can use pnd files on a normal linux box for testing ;)

jeff

(I know, we've been here before, but I forget; been awhile, and been through too many long work weeks :) IF it was just over the format (iso+footer), then that is of course a triviality, and we actually support already cramfs and other filesystem types in there.)
 
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I definitely think the PND format could be huge for linux if it takes off and evolves. Shame to see Vimacs bow out, but i've always said the lack of an easy and powerful executable format was what turned me off to linux. Hats off to Vimacs and to Skeezix for taking over and keeping the PND format a part of the project.
 
Skeezix isn't really "taking over", so much as absorbing Vimacs' portion. They were both working on it.
 
WizardStan said:
Skeezix isn't really "taking over", so much as absorbing Vimacs' portion. They were both working on it.
Oh, well i can't say i've been following the developers' threads too well... And my brain's burnt out after reading through the epic flame-packed OC'ing thread.
 
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And pnd is not an executable format, it is more a packaging system with a lot of conveniences tossed in, derived from a crackpot idea ED had about 2 years ago :)

Esentially, in concept, its like a .zip file you can run; we just ditched the need to install and uninstall, and made auto-discovery so things magicly appear. Theres a lot of bits to it, but thats the concept :)

jeff
 
skeezix said:
And pnd is not an executable format, it is more a packaging system with a lot of conveniences tossed in, derived from a crackpot idea ED had about 2 years ago :)

Esentially, in concept, its like a .zip file you can run; we just ditched the need to install and uninstall, and made auto-discovery so things magicly appear. Theres a lot of bits to it, but thats the concept :)

jeff
I do remember seeing the zip file comparison before. Not having to install/uninstall in linux is going to be a dream, and all I can say is that we're lucky to have such talented devs in the community :) This project would be nothing without you guys!
 
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