Problem is not only the number of developers, but sometimes the "head" of certain developers, IMHO we need to share knowledge, opinion and sources with other "Amiga clone" devs, it's quite strange having 3 different MPlayer version, 3 different OWB and so on ... :-/
In my experience, MorphOS developers seem to take it upon themselves to port or re-port something which has been ported to OS4, without involving or even telling the original porter, or the project's own admins.
I have seen so many things I've ported pop up on Aminet as MorphOS versions afterwards (usually I don't realise until months later as my filters are set to ignore MOS files)
There's some "interesting" hackery in the Fuse code from where it has been ported to MorphOS. If I had been told in advance I would have said to #define __USE_INLINE__ rather than #ifdef'ing the native OS4 interface-style code and adding almost exactly the same code without the interface pointers.
I can't remember whether I cleaned up all that nonsense or just left it.
In my experience, MorphOS developers seem to take it upon themselves to port or re-port something which has been ported to OS4, without involving or even telling the original porter, or the project's own admins.
Disagree. Its always not matter who follow to who. Just someone sometime are first one. Nothing more and nothing so "os-specific-programmes-side". About "creadits" , to be honest, for me make no sense if someone will use my port to make it working on other OS. Port happenes, and that cool. Anything else does not matter in general, only ego-related :)
We need both sorts of things. We do need big things like a mesa port for example. But a mesa or gallium API isn't very interesting if there's no software to use them either. Chicken and egg I guess, now that you have gallium, it's possible to port over pointless gimmicks that use it. OpenGL exists in some form for OS4, so we can already have pointless gimmicks ported over to use it.
I do have concerns that all the software we'll ever see is open-source ports from Linux land. I'd worry about that for any Amiga/alike OS, including AROS. If there's nothing or very little original for it, then why not go the easy way and just use Linux to start with?
I think it'd be a bad situation if all any of the Amiga/alike OSes are is just a difficult to port to platform for Linux apps.
And as for apps that are fully supported by their creators on multiple platforms, including some Amiga/alike OSes, well, why not still just use Linux or Windows or whatever isntead of being on an awkward to bring those programs to platform?
We're here and using whichever Amiga/alike OS because we want to, not because it's convenient or reasonable. Many of us are a bit unreasonable people, and so are our desires to keep some Amiga/alike OS on our desk. But we don't care about that, we're enjoying them and having fun anyway. Even if it's just for useless clocks, shell commands, and other crap, but we do on occasion get something truely fun or useful as well.
Stop trying to make sense of any of us using an Amiga/alike OS. That's just a big waste of time and brainpower right there.
I agree with your assessment of using ported software. Some is worthwhile and prevents the necessity of reinventing wheels. Web browsers, things that may need or should have cross-platform compatibility like document software, and maybe some games, time wasters etc.. But, things like 3D should be Amiga and not a ported over API just so it can be cross platform compatible unless that truly is *THE* best way to go.
Since the X1k is a new beginning perhaps what is needed is a view toward software that is *for* a beginning.
Problem is not only the number of developers, but sometimes the "head" of certain developers, IMHO we need to share knowledge, opinion and sources with other "Amiga clone" devs, it's quite strange having 3 different MPlayer version, 3 different OWB and so on ... :-/
Regarding MPlayer, there are only 2 versions, not 3. The AROS version is basically the same as MorphOS (including the integrated MUI GUI). The only difference is they couldn't use overlay, since their graphic system doesn't support it yet.
But it's indeed silly there are so many independant ports when the API are so close. I offered my help and code for MPlayer, MAME and a couple others: AROS people showed some interest and ported them successfully, but it seems some OS4 coders prefer recompiling plain SDL ports from scratch instead of reusing native amigaos code. Their loss, I guess.
@Chris
Quote:
In my experience, MorphOS developers seem to take it upon themselves to port or re-port something which has been ported to OS4, without involving or even telling the original porter, or the project's own admins.
I have seen so many things I've ported pop up on Aminet as MorphOS versions afterwards (usually I don't realise until months later as my filters are set to ignore MOS files)
There's some "interesting" hackery in the Fuse code from where it has been ported to MorphOS. If I had been told in advance I would have said to #define __USE_INLINE__ rather than #ifdef'ing the native OS4 interface-style code and adding almost exactly the same code without the interface pointers.
I can't remember whether I cleaned up all that nonsense or just left it.
It's indeed just your experience, because the opposite also happened just the same way, which is quite normal: MorphOS was there years before, so many ports were obviously (re)ported for OS4 several years after MorphOS. Some ports reused MorphOS code and others just ported programs again from scratch, especially the developers who chose to ignore anything MorphOS-related.
Now, about Fuse itself, from what i can see, the MorphOS port is listed on the website, and you're credited in the MorphOS readme.
ssolie: Edited out the "evil" comments.
Edited by Fab on 2010/7/24 1:08:50 Edited by ssolie on 2010/7/24 22:23:52
Disagree. Its always not matter who follow to who. Just someone sometime are first one. Nothing more and nothing so "os-specific-programmes-side". About "creadits" , to be honest, for me make no sense if someone will use my port to make it working on other OS. Port happenes, and that cool. Anything else does not matter in general, only ego-related :)
Agree, in part. If it is just a quick port nothing-to-see-here type of thing, then I wouldn't expect to know, probably won't care and deserve no credit. I get credited enough for things I haven't done anyway
For bigger projects, where some amount of work has gone in, and some Amiga-ness added (something I'm particulary fond of), then it can be useful to know, especially if they have fixed a bug in my code and it hasn't or won't work its way upstream (this also happened in Fuse, but in this case the fix was #ifdef'd for MOS only - if I had known they had the same problem and found a fix for it, it would have saved me a lot of work - especially as the problem I had was documented)
@Fab
Quote:
especially the developers who chose to ignore anything MorphOS-related (like you?) just for the sake of it.
I don't ignore it for the sake of it, I ignore it because I'm not interested until I'm porting something (when an existing MorphOS port might come in handy), and I can't run it.
Quote:
Now, about Fuse itself, from what i can see, the MorphOS port is listed on the website, and you're credited in the MorphOS readme.
It's in SVN so it is hardly surprising that it is on the website, and the credit is nice, although I only added a few little things - really the GUI code needs porting across to AmigaOS from SDL but I never got round to it.
My issue with the Fuse situation is that the MorphOS changes were a complete mess. At some point the person doing the porting must have thought, "surely no other multi-platform Amiga code looks anything like this?". A quick email to me or a post on the forum like this would have resolved this. My other issue is that they broke the OS4 compile and as I had no knowledge of the MOS port I didn't find out until I went to do a new compile for release - and IIRC I was pushed for time so wasn't impressed to find loads of unexpected compiler errors, and some neat code I had submitted rendered unreadable.
FWIW I don't blame the porter - they code on MOS, I don't expect them to know about OS4 interfaces. However, a little bit of thought and some communication would have kept the code tidier, given me ample warning to check the code still compiled and fixed a bug a lot sooner than it was.
I think they went round it the right way, but the dev team should have notified me that somebody had messed with my code and "perhaps I should check it still compiles". The porter should have told me they'd encountered the same sound problem I'd been complaining about and suggested the fix.
If we want to talk about re-ports done the wrong way, we can discuss NetSurf where both the MOS and OS3 versions came under fire from the dev team for various reasons.
Netsurf had to be ported again. OS4 version uses Reaction and I didnt want it. Reaction classes are not part of default MorphOS install (you either have to get it from Aminet or from OS 3.9 CD) and I have been doing MUI software last 15 years. I have got zero experience from Reaction/ClassAct.
Once Netsurf is ported to MUI it no longer has nothing in common with Reaction version. They are so different and especially since subclassing is used very often in MUI programming code works differently.
OS3 version of Netsurf is quite mess... devs had lot of problems due to inexperience with UI and other probs... (i.e. converting true colour rendering to work properly with OS3 API).
I know and understand the reasons for that, that's not the issue (although it does contain some of my and others code without credit). The port was done without any involvement from the dev team, and they weren't even aware of it until it was illegally released without the source code (GPL condition).
In the interests of all Amiga-like platforms, it is advisable to notify project maintainers of new ports when they are released. At the very least you'll get them thinking "the Amiga... I remember those", but hopefully integration into the main source and a link on the website will come, and give more prominence to the platform. It's a bit of free advertising, and it makes ports of future versions and ports to other similar platforms easier, and gives the project itself a boost in the number of platforms they run on.
This is why I say, Fuse was handled right, NetSurf wasn't.
For the OS3 version of NetSurf the core devs want a proper version written rather than framebuffer+hacks, and have distanced themselves from it as it is an unofficial fork.
@Chris The problem you have seen with ports *could* simply be due to inexperience of the coders concerned, and have nothing to do with the "colour" of their favourite OS.
But most of the problem with sharing code seems to be due MOS using one GUI system & OS4 using another. Most of the problems would go away if we had a shared GUI system - but there was already a looong thread (on AW.net?) about that.
Although I'd be interested to know why MUI4 hasn't been ported to OS4 (when we already have a native MUI3.9 port).
Netsurf is GPL'd so there is no need to ask permission from anyone. But yeah in some aspects it didnt go well. I made a port in hurry and in last days I used all possible means to finish it before I was going to work abroad (that happens occasionally). When developers queried for source code I was unaware of matters as I didnt read my personal emails until I was back. Netsurf developers were pissed but sometimes sh*t happens. I talked with developers on IRC and case was closed.
As far as editing common source for all platforms... if original porter used interfaces I usually leave it as is and write new code for OS3 or MorphOS port. I think it is easier because I cant know if original developer had other ideas for interfaces. Sometimes sections can be merged to one #ifdef AMIGA section. But there is also a chance that you accidentally break other builds, happened to me couple of times with some SVN projects.
What also comes to mind is these opensource amigaos applications like YAM, MUI classes and co that were several times broken (OS3.x and/or MorphOS builds) when OS4 specific changes were added.
No, i don't know, i can only think Hyperion wasn't interested in getting or porting it, or that they agreed with stuntzi only for MUI3.9. I really don't know about this.
No, i don't know, i can only think Hyperion wasn't interested in getting or porting it, or that they agreed with stuntzi only for MUI3.9. I really don't know about this.
The only reason an OEM version of MUI had to be included in AmigaOS 4.x is the OEM version of IBrowse.
At that time IBrowse was still developed and an IBrowse version 3.x with CSS and DOM support was planned. If it would have been known that there wont be any updates of IBrowse any more it would have been much better to include AWeb instead, like in AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9, and porting MUI 3.9 to AmigaOS 4.x and including an OEM version of it wouldn't have been required.
@joerg Btw, maybe you can explain why MUI4 are not happenes for aos4 ? (imho you see already himself, that having mui4 + reaction on aos4, will give us more freedom to do ports and code between all platforms, in compare with having only reaction).
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