Re: [NTLK] [ANN] DCL no longer supported

From: Eric W. Brown <feneric_at_mac.com>
Date: Fri Mar 10 2006 - 09:51:27 EST

> Furthermore, having just read about the rebirth of a connection
> library project not based on the DCL, I am just disgusted by the way
> the Newton Community and the developers make use of source code
> availability.

I think that the Newton community has an extra challenge in that we
got pretty well fragmented back in the late '90s and there are
members of it (I can say with authority because I was one myself
until quite recently) who haven't found NewtonTalk yet. Most of the
Newton sites either died completely (like NewtNews) or exist in a
sort of zombie state (like Planet Newton); it's even non-trivial
these days getting hold of all the official Apple documentation that
was released to the world by Newton Inc. back in the day.

I personally didn't know that the DCL existed until seeing it
mentioned here in this thread. I didn't fully realize what it did
until digging into its site.

This being said I'm sorry I didn't hear about it sooner. I've only
just started to glance through it, and there is definitely a treasure
trove of stuff in there. While I've not been writing (or plan to
write) any synchronization software, the NewtonScript DTD that you
have would have potentially saved me some work (which unfortunately
now I've already done) while working on another project.

I don't think it's really malice or stubbornness or even indifference
that causes developers to repeat one another's work in most cases --
I think it's often a simple case of just not knowing what's available.

> In spite of the huge work and the availability of its source code,
> the DCL has never been used by anyone else and we mostly got
> complaints. It nearly works, it just lacks love.

I plan on utilizing both the DTD and possibly the NSOF to XML
converter in a project I'm working on now, so soon there will be at
least one other independent project making use of it. If you're
interested, I will let you know more.

Out of curiosity, how much love does it lack? How close do you think
it is to working? I may have missed it, but I didn't see anything
really documenting the known bugs / missing features / etc. Is there
a basic list someplace?

Anyhow, thanks for all your efforts. They truly are appreciated. As
an owner of a couple of Newtons (only one of which is used) I plan to
be making a ROM image and trying out a copy of the Mac OS X version
of Einstein. (As an aside, I didn't even learn about Einstein prior
to discovering this list -- I had only known about GNUton.)

-- 
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Received on Fri Mar 10 09:56:38 2006

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