[Pan-users] Re: Not a problem or a bug but a compliment

[Duncan]

Alex van Niel <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Wed, 14 Jun 2006 22:54:00
+0200:

> not sure if this is allowed or even appreciated here but I would like to
> say that I am very very glad that this project has been reanimated again.
> I was looking through the history of the Pan project and noticed that for
> 2 years the project had been dorment. But since april of this year,
> development seems to have had a jump start.

Not a dev but a regular here that considers it "my" project too, and yes,
it /is/ appreciated!  =8^)

A bit of a correction, however.  While PAN DID SEEM dead for a couple
years, we now know it wasn't.  What was actually happening during much of
that time anyway is that  Charles was working on the top-to-bottom rewrite
in C++ that became pan 0.90+.  It was a LOT of work, and he didn't want to
say anything about it as he had no idea when or if he'd finish it, so the
project /looked/ dead for two years.

That's a big reason progress has been so fast since the 0.90 release.  The
rewrite cut out all the dead code, remodularizing things for much easier
maintenance.   As well, C++ goes farther with less lines of source code
(tho it makes the compiler work far harder to get decent code, the reason
compiling C++ take more memory and time than compiling C, for the same
sized program, what the programmer doesn't have to do, the compiler
must do) and due to the object oriented nature is far easier to
modularize, so easy maintainability should be far easier to maintain -- it
won't tend toward the spaghetti code as fast -- while all the while
continuing to add new features at a faster rate with still less work than
previously possible.

So anyway, it was a very long two years, but we are seeing the results
now.  It's reasonably possible we'll see a 1.0 before year-end, and
continue on beyond, where had Charles continued working on the C code that
was 0.14.x, we'd still likely only now be getting to 1.0 if we were even
close to it yet, and the code would be far worse and far harder to push
beyond 1.0.

So anyway, very glad you like it! =8^)  I certainly do too, or I wouldn't
have spent all this time answering questions on the list the last several
years, making it my project too! =8^)  Charles deserves our thanks and
that of all the others, too, as he's worked hard and it shows!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman