From: Scot McSweeney-Roberts (newton_at_mcsweeney-roberts.co.uk)
Date: Thu Sep 09 2004 - 06:21:56 PDT
Jim Witte wrote:
>released before it was completely "done" (in terms of stability,
>synchronization capability via plug-ins, API interfaces, etc. as
>open-source with the intention that other developers would pick up and
>make it better. No-one did.
>
>Part of the problem was the the DCL is an enormous system of code that
>is somewhat intimidating. There is no real manual or "tutorial code"
>that would show you how to program with it by degrees. I must admit I
>haven't looked at the code that much.
>
>
>
I think one of the problems with the DCL is that it's not been released
under one of the "recognized" opensource licenses, but it's own licence.
I think other developers are going to be more likely to use
it/contribute to it if it's license was a bit more standard (ie, either
under the GPL, LGPL or BSD license). I'm not even certain that the
license qualifies as open source according to the Open Source
Initiative's definition (it's certainly not in thier list of approved
licences). When I was looking at the DCL for a little project of mine
I'm slowly working on, one of the things that turned me off of it was
the fact that the license was non-standard and to be honest at times
rather odd - not only was it in two languages it also mandated such
things as coding style.
Another problem with the DCL is, as you say, the lack of documentation.
I have a pile of code sitting there, that I know little about with
little help on learning how to use it. By the time I've read the through
the source and come to understand it enough to use it, there's a good
chance that I could have just written what ever functionality I needed
(in my case, I wanted an nsof -> XML convertor, which has so far been
reasonbly easy to implement in python).
Another problem with the DCL is that it's just not done in a very linuxy
manner - it seems to be more orientated towards OS/X. Besides a
directory layout that screams of OS/Xness, it doesn't appear to folow
the usual configure/make/make install way of building stuff on
Linux/*BSD, which is where most open source developers live. As it looks
like there are builds of it for linux it must be possible to build, but
again the lack of documentation kicks in and makes the DCL unusable.
Scot
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