Bruce ONeel <beoneel at bluewin.ch> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I think it would be very important to have Ian on board if
> his Unix Vm is not going to be the primary one since he
> did the origional port.  It also would be good if the
> SF VM came as a tar file and easily built on
> many systems, not just linux.
> 
> Beyond that I don't have a strong feeling.   The nicest
> possible solution would be for the two efforts to marry :-) 
> 

Absolutely.  But how?  There seems to be a fundamental rift between
individual maintenance and group maintenance.  Ian's version can undergo
major design changes without requiring the bickering that would normally
happen among the SF group.  On the other hand, many routine patches on
SF have gone for years without being integrated into Ian's version.

By the way, the group-maintained versions (SF, SHA, "Lex's patches") 
have been, at any given time, at least as portable as the official
version from Ian.  I personally recompile it about twice a year on
SunOS, Solaris, and IRIX.


I don't know what to do overall.  It does seem like wasted effort, but
both versions seem pretty legitimate!


Lex