Hi, To clear up some things to avoid misunderstandings: I will continue keeping the https patch up to date, no matter what else I'll do. As there seems to be enough demand, I will update the installer once a while too.
Sometimes, it took quite some time before Jorge looked at the patches and fixed or accepted (or rejected) them.
I had zero feedback the last 3 weeks, not very motivating. Merely a short email to say that it will be looked at or that it has no priority would be appreciated, I mean, _any_ feedback is. Now it's just a black hole where you pour patches into. Don't forget that it's their program you spend time writing a patch for, but currently it feels like it's a privilege to have your patch integreted in Dillo, even expecting some feedback is asked too much for. May I come to the conclusion that I should spend my time on something else instead of wasting it on Dillo? If they aren't willing to spend 10 minutes writing a short email, why should I spend hours or even days writing and testing some Dillo patch? I don't expect the Dillo developers to just integrate my https patch or so, I wouldn't either without a lot testing and making sure it's stable, but I would expect that they give some feedback about it, I mean, it's their program, they wrote it, so I would expect that they know the code better, so could give good advice about pitfals etc. Or just simply say "no, we don't like your approach, let us keep using wget for https". But for the IO.c patch it's a different case, all it is is a cleanup of their code, naive as I am, I would expected them to want cleaner code, even if it's a small step like I made with the patch.
Anyways, that's how it works here. I got used to it.
Working with one feedback per month is impossible if you want to do major IO cleanups as I want.
However, the core developers probably need to read all mails and keep track with a whole lot more patches - therefore, even they may miss one or two patches/suggestions.
Whole lot more patches? Looking at the CVS activity then I'm not too sure. Also there is a reasonable amount of old patches for Dillo already: multiple https implementations (I only found the last one when I started on mine), UTF8 support, server/client mode, and other I can't remember/didn't found. And looking at the mailing list, they didn't get much feedback either. All those people hooked off as far as I can tell, except Frank.
So, please stay with the project ... hmmm ... some semi-serious suggestion ;-) : do some christmas shopping, enjoy the holidays and wait for the feedback from the developers ...:-)
Christmas shopping? Need money for that I suppose. Enjoy the holidays? Have no job, so it's always holiday for me ;-). And don't know where you live, but christmas is just a commercial paradise here.
However, overall, I like the dpi idea. There are certain advantages:
As with many things, the idea is good, the implementating isn't, IMHO.
- For me, it makes it rather easy to contribute, since I need to only write a program and not to dig through dillo's code (if only I did write more than my simplistic finger plugin ;-) ...)
True, but if I look at the default plugins they're not as easy to make as it should be.
- The concept of extra processes instead of extra code has advantages : - with the download plugin being a seperate process you can even log out of X while the download continues (e.g. over night on dial-up).
That is true. I don't know if you noticed, but if you want to use the current download plugin, you need to start up 3 processes... First, the dpid, then the download dpi, which in turn starts wget. I'm so naive to think it could be only wget, with a simple "handle this protocol with this program with this parameters in this way" system. This way you could also startup your favourite email program when encountering mailto:, to give just one example. Don't forget that there is specific code in Dillo to handle certain plugins like the bookmark and download plugins. The plugins aren't really standalone. Sure, it's not finished yet, but the current dpi system can't solve that problem. What I would do is make a clear library plugin api, then you can implement the download and bookmark GUI in a library, and let the library start up wget. You can even implement a library plugin that handels the dpi plugins, instead of adding the code to Dillo's core as now happened (I mean moving the dpi code into a library plugin). This way you can have relative simple and small library plugins that don't do much, which let external programs like wget do the real work. Or add the features directly in the library plugin, whatever you want.
- the bookmark plugin allows for a real bookark server ! This is something I am contemplating about : wouldn't it be cool if you could access the same bookamrks from different machines via a sophisticated bookmark server ?
No, it doesn't. Not with the current dpi system anyway. As I said in an earlier email, the bookmark plugin should probably be a real, standalone daemon, so that it can also be used with other browser, from different pc's. It can even be hosted by some site, so that wherever you go, you can get your bookmarks :). Of course Dillo could have special support for it, so that it's easier to add bookmarks, and that it's started when it isn't running yet, but the main point is that the bookmark server won't be a dpi plugin, or can't be because you can't use unix sockets as the current dpi system uses now (which is fine for a plugin system, but not when you want to connect to non-local pc's). Greetings, Indan