Raspberry Pi RC16
Stuart Painting (5389) 712 posts |
In case you haven’t noticed, RISC OS Pi RC16 is now available for download. My initial impressions (on a Pi 3B) are that it’s very good. Some notes:
No doubt I’ve missed quite a lot… |
Chris Johnson (125) 825 posts |
I am baffled by that. As far as I can see both of these files are part of the html manual within the application. Why is Packman complaining about a conflict (with what?). |
Stuart Painting (5389) 712 posts |
I don’t get it either. The files in the “Backup1” directories are identical to the replacement files – even the file permissions are the same. Sunspot activity, perhaps? |
Chris Hall (132) 3554 posts |
What a pity that !Zap is not included. Still at least RISC OS 5.26 is now finally available under the new licence. |
Chris Mahoney (1684) 2165 posts |
Should the startup screen still have a Castle logo on it? |
Bryan (8467) 468 posts |
For some time now, with the ‘latest’ riscos/img file, I have not seen the keyboard not present message. Is it intentional that it is now visible again? I thought the boot was better without. |
Bryan (8467) 468 posts |
There is an icon on the desktop with the name !ePic. If I double click it, I get an unhelpful error message – [unknown] application not seen by filer. something assumes that a browser has been seen |
Chris Hall (132) 3554 posts |
Surely !NetSurf is in Apps and the first time RC16 is run, it opens a browser window with a help message. |
David Pitt (3386) 1248 posts |
!ePic runs a URI file, but that filetype is not set up by !NetSurf’s !Boot, so simply booting NetSurf is insufficient. The URI filetype does not become fully active until !NetSurf is run. To avoid that have !ePic run a URL file. Tested here. The URL file contains only the URL and is filetype b28. Alternatively, once NetSurf is connected to the ePic site, the URL file is created by Shift-dragging from NetSurf’s URL bar. And the Obey Mode is missing from StrongED. |
Bryan (8467) 468 posts |
Yes, but if a user does not double click on !ePic until after a reboot then the the error will occur. |
André Timmermans (100) 655 posts |
I had the same message last year as well as mouse issue (the mouse would not behave correctly till I had clicked once on each of the mouse buttons). Then I took everything with me while visiting a friend and then it started to behave. I suspect the order in which the USB devices are connected is important. |
Bryan (8467) 468 posts |
I agree. The USB order can matter in a number of scenarios. But this one is quite simply that the recent riscos/img downloads do not show the message and this build does. (tested by swapping between image files in loader, with no other changes) |
Sprow (202) 1155 posts |
Has there been any movement on resolving the redistribution questions since 2016? The RISC OS Pi image ends up on NOOBS (for example) so requires a somewhat robust chain of evidence that it’s not just an SD card chock full of bootleg warez. |
Chris Mahoney (1684) 2165 posts |
While we’re at it, do the manuals need to look like they’ve been copied from a DOS machine? For example, can the Style Guide be renamed to Style or StyleGuide, instead of STYLE/PDF? |
Andrew McCarthy (3688) 605 posts |
Initial observations:
On reading http://zap.tartarus.org/copyright I don’t see how that applies to !Zap … If you included !Sibelius then I’d agree with you… IMHO better to provide pointers to software and let the user decide, after all ;-) !Edit is included. Overall I like the build and it’s simplicity, including the changelog. I think the ReadMe could be worded differently all refs to Linux, Unix, Windows removed. Perhaps talk about RISC OS being part of the first ARM ecosystem, having a community or it being tailored to ARM processor – it’s history and innvoation…(WYSIWYG). |
Jeffrey Lee (213) 6048 posts |
Bootleg warez I’m sure the official version of Zap from zap.tartarus.org could be included without problem. But that version is useless on modern machines – you need to use a copy which has been patched by the community. The problem is that that text you’ve linked to denies the permission to distribute modified versions of the app. Looking at the “It’s been over 12 years…” message from the github repo/mailing list, I believe the way we’re expected to resolve this situation is:
But judging by the thread Sprow linked to, nobody seems willing to take on the responsibility of being an official maintainer. |
Andrew McCarthy (3688) 605 posts |
Ta. C’est la vie… ;-) Slaps forehead in dismay… More observations…
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Rick Murray (539) 13806 posts |
Or simply ask James to reword the licence to remove that specific restriction. It made sense when there were maintainers to have an official copy and block broken clones and hacks. However, many years down the line, it’s a restriction that is hurting Zap. I’m purposefully ignoring that part of the licence, because it’s either ignore it or Zap dies with the RiscPC era. There’s no point in keeping the “no mods” term, it’s not as if everybody is going to go fork Zap the moment that clause gets removed!
I’ll do my best to fix bugs, but to be honest I don’t actually understand how a lot of it works. |
Andrew Rawnsley (492) 1443 posts |
Rick – at this point, I think it is more a case of someone taking a responsibility for it, rather than understanding it intimately. Other people can get intimate with it if they wish, so long as someone active is willing to accept the project as a whole. It looks like that “somebody” needs to be someone with an understanding/experience of git though (narrows it down somewhat). They can then push through a re-licensing and others can take the code on from there. |
Rick Murray (539) 13806 posts |
Why? Okay, I’ll grant you, source control makes sense when there are multiple maintainers, but…. that’s a bridge to cross when the need arises. Besides, given it’s a much simpler project than an OS, wouldn’t CVS suffice? We already have a suitably competent client, it’s nowhere near as overcomplicated as Git, and something that I would absolutely demand (if being involved with it myself) is that it be fully visible/useable on NetSurf. GitLab fails badly in this respect (while the older CVS was fine).
Just a tweak to remove the “no mods” wording. It would be nice to have the project come under a recognised, open, non encumbered 2 licence but making changes like that will require the agreement of all the copyright holders, reciprocally through all of the extensions and add-ons. Best not to poke that with a stick… 1 Yes, urine is being extracted. 2 These two words added to discount GPL. |
Steve Fryatt (216) 2103 posts |
Probably because the suggestion was that the lucky new owner would get given the keys to the Git repository…
No, it’s a bridge to cross now, otherwise we return again and again to the current situation, where we have Zap-tnk, Zap-tim, Zap-Ultimate, Zap-whatever…
If you were going for “not Git”, you would probably use Subversion these days. CVS has too many restrictions and issues to be a sensible choice for a new project. Besides, IT’S IN GIT NOW. Use Git.
What if that option isn’t on the table?
That may well apply to removing the “no mods” wording, too. |
Steve Fryatt (216) 2103 posts |
OK, serious question: if someone were to approach James and attempt to coordinate this, is anyone actually genuinely serious about updating Zap at all? |
David Feugey (2125) 2709 posts |
Why? The next guy who will maintain Zap will probably be alone
Good question :) |
Steve Fryatt (216) 2103 posts |
Let’s break that into two questions. “Why use version control?”. Because the reality now is that Zap is more likely to become a project patched by its users rather than developed by any one person. In four years, no-one has come forward in response to James’ post, and that itself was many years after the last serious update. If there was someone out there, they would have stepped forward by now. In the meantime, we’ve had numerous guerilla updates, which have become a mess to keep track of. And if, in the future, the new maintainer’s interest dies out again, having the code in a public repository means that others can still pick it up at some point1 even if the maintainer can no longer be contacted. “Why use Git?”. Because it’s the best option for new projects, as it’s far better than even SVN at handling collaborative work. It looks scary, but if you take a short while to find out how it works (perhaps with a good graphical GUI), you’ll kick yourself for not learning it sooner.
Why do you think that? Evidence so far is that no-one is maintaining it, but numerous people are patching it. 1 To pick a topical example, if previous WinEd developers had taken the approach being espoused by Rick and yourself, we wouldn’t have had a “High Vector Happy” version this week. The reason we do is because the source was in a public version control system, from which I could download it, change it, and then commit the changes back. In fact, the last developer’s copy of the source is lost, which is why we can’t find out what WinEd 3.22a looked like. |
Rick Murray (539) 13806 posts |
Which means either:
Or:
Generally… the most recent is the definitive. It’s also why I put together “Zap Ultimate”. You no longer need to get this from here, that from there, etc. It’s a full release that can be installed without the hassles of the guerilla updates.
Until the Next Best Thing comes along.
To neatly refute your nice example – Zap Ultimate is on !Store exactly because of the method of random zip files. It’s far from perfect and it sucks as revision control, but the code within was more up to date than the Git ones. Oh, and I eventually downloaded the code from Git because of something I didn’t appear to have. You know what I ended up with? A bloody great pile of files in an archive and not a single one filetyped.
There, fixed that for you. I didn’t get Zap from any version control. But it exists because the source exists.
Which, I suppose, was easy for you because you took something and fixed it. What about when something has been taken, fixed multiple times, and the changes not fed back? I’m not arguing against version control. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good idea and it is certainly useful to be able to do things like “oh crap, this breaks stuff, let’s revert” as well as keeping an itemised list of what changed when, and if desired, showing actual differences between versions. What I’m mostly arguing against is tools that do not play nicely with RISC OS. To pick a topical example, your earlier message implies that you built WinEd on Linux… |