Hi Paul
Oh yeah, now I remember why I went with swish-e...

My point was that is would be great to have the source code
open via a remote RCS system, so someone could simply
check out the files they wanted to change and have the rest
of the code come out of the "official" source code repository.

I also think that a group-effect is probably more suited to
the jump to distributed development since they might have
the resources to host the RCS system. I also think that a
group has more built-in checks and balances, and can be
more tolerant to new users and requests for features than
some one-person projects that come to mind. 

Lastly, I figured C++ is the way to go from here on out (vs C).
esp since there was already a considerable effort along
those lines, and that effort had substantial benefits such as
improved performance and robustness when dealing with large
indexes.  From what I've seen you did a great job with swish++ 
and moving both efforts into one common project could have
been of value to everyone. Oh well.

Later
	Mark

At 09:45 AM 11/2/98 -0800, Paul J. Lucas wrote:
>On Mon, 2 Nov 1998, Mark Gaulin wrote:
>
>> Right now swish-e is the "official" version and swish++ is (correct me
if I'm
>> wrong) one person's effort.
>
>	Both packages are under the GPL.  I consider them to be on
>	equal footing in terms ov availability and changeability.  As
>	far as being "official," I would say that, no, SWISH++ is not
>	"officially" part of the SWISH-E effort, but SWISH-E is not
>	part of the SWISH++ effort either.  Presumeably, SWISH-E is
>	endorsed by Berkeley, but, outside of Berkeley, that doesn't
>	mean anything.
>
>	As far as being "one person's effort," I fail to see what that
>	has to do with anything or somehow makes SWISH++ subordinate to
>	a multi-person effort (which is what I infer from what you
>	wrote).  The number of people who work on a software project is
>	unrelated to the functionality or quality of the software.
>	Some big examples of good single-person efforts: vi (Bill Joy),
>	emacs (Richard Stallman), Perl (Larry Wall), TeX (Donald
>	Knuth), C++ (Bjarne Stroustrup).
>
>> In either case it is difficult for any programmers other than the people
>> directly in charge of the code to make changes.  It would be nice if a
>> distributed, "open source" system was put in place so that individual
>> contributors could get in, make changes, and get out.
>
>	Excuse me?  Both packages are under the GPL.  That mens anybody
>	is free to grab the source and makes changes.  If that isn't
>	"open" I don't know what is.
>
>	FYI: I've already received some patches for SWISH++ and
>	incorporated them.  The authors of said patches apparently had
>	no trouble obtaing the source code and making changes.
>
>> And, for the record, I would love to use C++ over C for this, or any
project.
>
>	Why?
>
>> Hey, maybe porting swish-e to C++ would solve those nagging
ansi/not-so-ansi
>> C porting issues we had when 1.3 was released.
>
>	Well, yes, porting SWISH-E to C++ would solve that problem, but
>	so would porting it to ANSI C (which I had always assumed it
>	was, but, from reading others' experiences, I guess it isn't).
>	IMHO, there's no excuse for having a non-ANSI C program these
>	days.
>
>	- Paul
>