We need to coordinate

[autc04]

I've done extensive hacking on my fork of executor, and it's high time I coordinated with other people who're interested in executor again...

I've tried emailing @ctm and @MaddTheSane, but haven't received a reply, so I guess some spam filter was in the way.

I have...

• deleted a lot of code
• ported to 64-bit
• modernized some things (a lot fewer macros, C++ templates instead of genstubify, ...)
• added a half-finished, slow SDL2 frontend
• added a half-finished, even slower Qt forntend with support for rootless mode
• switched to CMake
• tried porting to windows again (no success yet)

It's too much to put into a pull request to dump on someone who is not expecting to do any maintenance work on executor any more, but it's high time I talked with everyone else who's interested in hacking on executor.

Cheers,

Wolfgang

[TheRealCatherine]

Wow! That sounds like some great major improvements!

[ctm]

Wolfgang, I did get your email. I am super excited by and happy with the work you've done and embarrassed and disappointed in myself for not having responded yet. I will do so later today. I would do so now, except it's supposed to start raining in a couple hours and I need to get out the door and get my exercise in before it rains.

[ctm]

For the record, I've responded (favorably!) to @autc04 's email both complimenting him on his work as well as letting him know that I'm happy to help with coordination or even turn it over to him. I was able to quickly build and run Executor on my development laptop, although I did run into some screen weirdness.

I've had another person send me some email about Executor "recently" and I'll let him know about this issue and Wolfgang's work.

[MaddTheSane]

I've been trying to figure out how to make Executor use Mac OS X's resource forks. I think I found out how to do it (read from /..namedfork/rsrc) now I need to figure out where, and implement the how.

[autc04]

I actually forgot to mention that :-).
I have a first version of this working (commit 7e465e3), but I don't quite trust it yet. I'm not sure if I've actually tried moving files around yet.
I think the file system code needs a redesign, maybe based on the C++17's std::filesystem. When I try to read that code, I keep getting confused by all the C string manipulation, and it's missing at least a layer of abstraction. And I'm not sure where the hfs code is going, I wouldn't trust it after my 64-bit hacks, and the concept seems fundamentally incompatible with the idea of running one executor instance per mac app... maybe we should leave HFS access to third party tools and simplify the code we want to maintain?

[autc04]

Another thing that needs deciding is what to do about the Mac frontend; I've removed the mac-specific frontend from my fork because I think it contains too much ancient NeXT-specific code to be worth maintaining. A new mac frontend would probably be a lot less work than getting the old code to work well. For the time being, I'm trying to get the Qt frontend to work well enough with some platform-specific hacks (and the idea of having a dedicated mac frontend sounds better and better to me).
@MaddTheSane, I think you've gotten a lot farther than I ever have in getting the NeXT/Mac frontend to run, do you think I should put it back into my branch, or should a new one be developed?

[MaddTheSane]

Definitely a new Mac front-end. There were a lot of architectural changes when Apple updated NeXTStep to Mac OS X. For instance, the NeXTStep code expects the system encoding to be NeXT Roman. I was on a huge NeXTStep kick when I tried to revive the code. I don't even think it works right now.

[autc04]

I've started a wiki page at https://github.com/ctm/executor/wiki/Plans---TODO where I listed a lot of ideas that I want to do / think that should be done / would be cool to have / etc.
It could serve the dual purpose of collecting ideas and telling each other what we're about to do.

[umbertocerrato]

Hey there!
How can I learn about Executor? Can I talk to someone?

Best

[autc04]

If what you want to learn is related to my Executor 2000 fork, you can head over there (https://github.com/autc04/executor) and either ask a question publicly on github or write to my email address privately, which you'll find in the README.md file there.

[umbertocerrato]

If what you want to learn is related to my Executor 2000 fork, you can head over there (https://github.com/autc04/executor) and either ask a question publicly on github or write to my email address privately, which you'll find in the README.md file there.

Hi @autc04,
Thank you very much.