Re: [Mldonkey-users] Development?

[kami petersen]

Brett Dikeman wrote:

> Until you guys start taking releases seriously, everyone's going to view your
> releases, and hence the mldonkey project in general, for what it always is-
> unstable, bug-riddled, with major missing functionality problems.
>
> The haphazard releasing of new versions has caused numerous problems in the
> past, and users have expressed incredible frustration at both quality of
> releases and versioning schemes.
>  

as things are starting to heat up here i'll quoute myself from the 
mldonkey world forums (see 
http://mldonkey.berlios.de/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1476&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0&sid=4f8489bdaa2d2cb0b65d5f43e5826e43) 
on some topics that i really didn't get much feedback:

"how about installation and packaging? with the arrival of a new gui, 
this might be about time... just a simple make install for *nix and 
maybe some simple installer for windows, with a configuration wizard and 
all =) eh? i think this is just as important for a mature project as a 
nice gui. and quite frankly, i hope that with new versioning comes 
healthier release practises. maybe set up a more formal group of 
testers, of course from different platforms?"

...

"my ideas are based on the notion that mldonkey is about to become a 
"mature" application. as such there are no excuses for bad user 
interaction and sloppy system integration. just throwing it all into a 
directory and zipping it up might be ok for your average high-school 
visual basic hello world homework.

don't know much about the windows client but what i'm suggesting with 
the *nix "make install" would be to harmonize mldonkey with the way 
programs ought to be installed, in proper locations, i.e. executable in 
/usr(/local)/sbin/, configuration files and dowload/share directories 
in, let's say, /var/mldonkey/, which would presumable also be a good 
chroot location. this should of course be possible to override in the 
./configure stage. (how about ./configure 
[-install-dir=/non/default/dir1/] -enable-chroot[=/non/default/dir2/] 
for instance =))

mldonkey is a daemon, connected to the internet. this is of course the 
most hazardous kind of program, and actually, if you ask me i think it 
is a bad idea to be able to change the configuration at all while running.

next, maybe someone should start to compile a man page covering at least 
basic setup and operation. i could probably help with that, if my other 
points are supported.

i very much welcome any efforts to make mldonkey available to the 
mainstream, but that probably also mean that we should think about 
cutting down on configuration options, at least for stabile releases.

these shortcomings would never be tolerated in any other network daemon. 
also, i imagine, mldonkey will be a lot more easy for mldonkey (now as 
it is becoming more and more stabile) to make it into official ports.

maybe in windows mldonkey should be installed as a service."

...

"yeah, maybe it's a good time to restructure interface protocols, so 
that it would be Real Easy to customize gui and scripting functions. i 
think adding xml not only to the interface, but also to configuration 
would be nice."


that's all =)


Brett Dikeman wrote:

> useless shiny things.  It does not matter how nice a car looks if you can only
> get into it from the sunroof.
>  
on this point i think your're wrong though =)

cheers,
kami