[Slime-devel] SLY, a fork of SLY

[Cyrus Harmon]

On Sep 5, 2014, at 10:43 AM, João Távora <joaotavora at gmail.com> wrote:

> [I'm sorry I sent the previous reply from my work email]
> 
> Cyrus Harmon <ch-slime at bobobeach.com> writes:
> 
>> I watched the video. It’s not immediately obvious what’s new here. Nor
>> is it obvious why any nifty features (inspector, trace statistics,
>> etc…) couldn’t be added to slime-contrib without a fork.
> 
> Well the video is less than 4 minutes long and a only brief tour. I have
> been working on this 6+ months and hundreds of commits.

That’s not too surprising.

> While I personally disagree with you, the goal *is* to make SLY feel
> familiar to SLIME users, which I think is a fantastic program.

I’m not sure how you can disagree that the changes between SLY and slime are not readily apparent from watching the video. You may be intimately familiar with the differences, but your enumerating some of them would certainly be helpful to folks like me. (Hopefully there’s not too much room for disagreement with this assertion, except possibly the fact that there might not be many folks like me).

> Finally, perhaps you'll change your mind if you try it or I'll make a
> better description of the features.

If that’s an either/or, I’ll take the better description of the features before I try it. Thanks.

>> Some comments on the motivation for the fork would be helpful.
> 
> OK, by popular request :-) here is _a_ comment.
> 
> Of course all of this could be possibly be added to SLIME, but not with
> the freedom that I believe was required for this work.

To each their own.

> As a sincere personal side note, I don't think forking a project
> detracts from the original at all. As a matter of fact the SLIME
> Hacker's Guide says
> 
>    Remember that to rewrite a program better is the sincerest form of code
>    appreciation. When you can see a way to rewrite a part of SLIME better,
>    please do so!

I don’t disagree with the idea of forking, but there needs to be some rationale for the fork. So far I’ve seen defense of the act of forking but neither a description of the motivation for the fork nor a summary of the benefits to the user for using the forked version.

thanks,

Cyrus