Messages - Arantor

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46
Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 12 March 2011 à 1h55 »
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They've started work on it.
Yes, I can confirm there is a branch in SVN for 2.1. Given where it is, the fact it's not in the trunk but is a branch and so far contains a variety of untested micro-optimisations... (I know they're untested because at least one has broken functionality) it strikes me as not being worth the effort so far. I haven't backported anything from there that I hadn't seen off the tracker (which to me seems fair game if it's in public) but most of it is full on micro optimisation rather than anything actually interesting.
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Now, all we're waiting for is for them to release SMF2 with the BSD license and then we can officially take over. Problem is, they know how much work we've put into our project... The same way they were scared of taking me in, they're probably now scared of allowing our fork to go public. Because it will only show the incredible gap between the SMF team's work and ours.
The official line on this is that it's still being tossed back and forth between the lawyers - yes, they had to bring in lawyers to negotiate the contract of sale of assets between the LLC and NPO. I'm not against that, given how much distrust and dissent there was, but it certainly doesn't make it any easier.

One of the comments was that it seemed like every time they got somewhere, it would be the weekend again, which is the real issue at stake here - it's not fear of us, because they'll do what they'll do regardless of us, but I suspect that once 2.0 final happens and we can start being more open, the real fur will fly once it becomes clear what might have been.

They're not worried about us right now, but I suspect it's going to be like Luke and Yoda - "I'm not afraid." / "You will be. You WILL BE."
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But overall, it's still based on the SMF engine.
It is for the moment. As time goes on it's morphing further and further away. When I get round to getting something committable for the ACP overhaul, then probably the single biggest element of SMF's codebase will have a fire lit under its ass - since the ACP accounts for a scary percentage of the code, and once it's gone (bearing in mind how much other stuff changes to accommodate it), I see the figures skewing much more towards 75/25 the other way.
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Hooks are not the be all and end all of plugin programming, though. Just look at WordPress... Everytime they release a new version, some older versions of plugins become incompatible.
Sure, hooks aren't everything - but it's a massive step up from where we are right now. I've seen a few mods appear using hooks, which are interesting, but the implementation of some of the hooks basically knee-capped anything seriously awesome with them.
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Actually, I'd really like for our fork to completely prevent the ability of modifying core code...
I'm not planning to remove that functionality, but I am going to make it harder to use; perhaps a prompt in the ACP if someone wants to do that ("This add-on modifies your forum's core files, are you sure you want to proceed?"), but I'll be looking at submitted mods to see what people are doing that warrants a raw code hack. Some ultimately will need it, it'll be unavoidable for some, but the vast majority case shouldn't.
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(Or even us...)
I fully expect to get into writing mods, I'm actually looking forward to the prospect to a point since I'll be able to get mods out there to fulfill the typical functions that don't need hacks (I have been trying to figure out how to engineer points in so that hooks or similar can be used, without having to use the joys of raw edits)
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You can't port anything without the original author's approval, of course.
This is a matter of no little debate on sm.org, so here's the full legal position:

* If you are the owner of the mod, go nuts.
* If you have permission of the author to do so, go nuts.
* If the mod is under a licence that expressly permits code remixing and forks (e.g. BSD, CC-BY-SA, LGPL) without any nasty side effects (e.g. GPL), go nuts.

Anything other than a fresh rebuild is off the table, though. It should be noted that I've been thinking about how to make mod data compatible; I've already said I wanted to make getting data from SMF+others to be an import process, rather than a conversion (you go into the ACP, press a button and say "I want data from <here>" and it gets it and pulls it into the forum that's already installed). What I'm aiming for with that is the ability to make it so modular that it can support pulling in boards and posts and stuff, but also that it can be used to inherit from mods - for example, if the user is coming from SMF+AeMe, that it can support importing the SMF core stuff and then AeMe. Or SMF Gallery Lite. Or any relevant content from SimplePortal or TinyPortal. I think you get the idea ;)


In closing, I'll leave you with a few thoughts.
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People with a vision scare them. Why do you think they've been stuck for the last 3 years on betas and RCs?
I don't think it's that people with a vision scare them. I think it's people who 1) have a vision that doesn't see exactly the same way as theirs and 2) have the ability to take that vision and make it real. Which certainly includes both of us.

As for SMF's vision and future, two things come to mind. Firstly, who remembers the "I'm a PC" / "I'm a Mac" ad campaigns? SMF is in that, holding a placard, "I'm a forum." Which is great, it knows what it is. But that's all it is. It's a capable, extensible forum. But there's no place in the vision for half of the features we're doing because they're not strictly forum features and so don't fall into their vision of what SMF's future should look like.

Daft as it sounds, I worry about SMF's future, because they don't HAVE a vision. The most solidly agreed points for 2.1 are: IPv6 support, maybe draft posting and decluttering the core to avoid IE6 support. Everything else is maybe and don't know. I don't know about you, but that doesn't exactly bode well for much happening in 2.1 or beyond.

47
Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 5 March 2011 à 22h12 »
Even though SAVE provides an inferior service, too. It really isn't as flexible with the different kinds of URL out there. But sheep will be sheep - which is fine since it means less hassle for us in the long run, since we're not trying to support multiple disparate things.

And for the record, I totally agree with Nao on the subject of innovation where SMF is concerned; nothing I have heard leads me to believe 2.1 will be that exciting a release, I really hope I'm wrong - for their sake.

48
Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 21 February 2011 à 10h32 »
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I don't speak Czech. What does it say?
Neither do I but Google Translate made what looked like reasonable sense of it.

49
Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 20 February 2011 à 19h24 »
Yup, RC5 was mostly security fixes, though the licence stuff is still hanging over everyone's head - the sole reason RC5 happened was because there was a security issue found (reported by me!) and it was sufficient that it needed to be fixed now rather than wait for the licence/legal stuff to be sorted.

I honestly don't know if there will be an RC6, but I know I reported another security-related matter in the last day or so in combating the bots out there that were trying to hijack accounts, which may or may not be fixed in a patch and may or may not trigger RC6. That said, I personally consider the issue I reported this time more serious than the one I reported last time; the issue that prompted RC5 was not, IMO, serious enough to warrant the patch release - this one would be. But I'm not the dev team, I don't have any sway on what they do/don't do.

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Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 12 February 2011 à 21h55 »
So, is it true that the delay for SMF 2.0 Final is because they are trying to come up with a license that makes it un-forkable? I worry that you guys might have shown your hand too early.
No, that's not true. I can't go into the true detail, but suffice to say, if they choose to release on a non BSD licence for final, they hit two major headaches - one, the delay will be many months as much code will have to be rewritten, and two, it will upset a decent proportion of the community who want final sooner rather than later.

The current licence is as RustyBarnacle says, unforkable. We know, we asked explicitly for an exception to allow us to fork, so that they could get rid of us, and both the NPO and LLC denied the request. Can't say I blame them for it, but it would have solved a lot of problems. There is, should we need to, a method for us to be able to distribute the code to the fork legally, but we'd rather not if we can help it.

As for 'tipping the hand early', in all honesty we didn't want it to be this way. We approached the team last August, with an offer to fork but in a way that meant they got patches and fixes for stuff as we found them. That's also why my account reappeared on sm.org, so that I could report to the bug tracker. (I did, even, report the bug that primarily sparked RC5 - yes, I'm the joker who encouraged them to release another RC because of what I called a security issue even if certain team members didn't agree it was a security matter)

Trouble is, after we tried to bridge the gap, we got shit on, at which point we became a hostile fork.

51
Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 12 February 2011 à 0h29 »
It's not a bad suggestion at all :)

Just we have 7 pages worth of topics of 'stuff we're pretty sure we're doing' first...

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Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 11 February 2011 à 17h47 »
Ah, I see.

There aren't any plans to add it right now, but truth be told we do have one or two things that take higher priority than this (like IPv6 support, rewriting the admin panel, you know, little things), but we can certainly look at it.

I'm not keen on the JS requirement, though. Personally I'd rather encourage user education: don't post emails publicly, you want to give out an email address, PM someone.

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Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 11 February 2011 à 13h42 »
That's the default in SMF 2.0 anyway. Users have to opt-in to their email address being seen ;)

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Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 9 February 2011 à 0h52 »
Define 'email obfuscation'

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Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 5 February 2011 à 23h22 »
The simple answer is yes, you will need to modify your mod - substantially, in all likelihood.

Firstly, $smcFunc is no more, it doesn't exist at all in the fork. Secondly, and more importantly, the whole system is going to be shaped more and more over time to avoid this tedious, fragile process of code modifying. For the vast majority of things, it's simply unnecessary - even in 2.0 RC4 it's less necessary with the integration hooks that are present, but the whole system needs to be massively expanded for it to be really useful.

56
Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 4 February 2011 à 15h41 »
Apparently it's not, apparently they feel they may have to release another release to fix a security issue that I reported (though, according to Thantos, it's been known for years... and no-one thought to fix it?) because they feel it needs to be fixed and they're not ready to go to final yet in terms of licensing.

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Or better, make shit version independent in the first place, like WordPress mostly does...

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Is it actually confirmed that the current SGL/SGP converters don't work for recent versions of that shitty mod?
The DB structure appears to have changed slightly since his 'complete rewrite' in 3.0 so no, I don't think it works. But as the reason I'm out $250 is apparently that I was planning to do a better version that 'apparently' was based on his code (what? I'd reuse his crap? I don't think so), I take it as read that nothing based on his code is allowed - which includes converters.

(Oh, and I'm guessing that's the reason. I still don't know for sure since no-one ever actually told me.)

59
Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 24 January 2011 à 8h43 »
It's coming along magnificently :)

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Aeva Media / Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
« on: 20 January 2011 à 14h03 »
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This year?
Given that we've made 500 or so revisions - some of which individually commit a few HUNDRED changes across the code base or add complete new features at a time, just since August 2010, I think it's fair to say this year is likely for a release, just because we are able to throw the time, energy and experience we have at it.
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Assuming SMF goes gold inside that time frame o' course
I'm going to hedge my bets at this point and say that I see no reason why 2.0 final won't happen this year. Even if that were the case, we do have a get out of jail free card on that score, but we'd rather not use it if we can help it.

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