Re: nightfall 0.10 bug report

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <Pine.LNX.3.96.990319152309.11288A-100000@hspc44.hs.uni-hamburg.de>,
 st8h304@hs.uni-hamburg.de writes:
>> Also, I'm curious how active the development is on Nightfall right now.
>
>I am the only person working on it right now, and I am releasing a new
>version about twice/month. Vers. 0.11 (including a fix for your problem) 
>is scheduled for next Tuesday. 
>I am quite interested on some feedback with respect to the useability
>of the program for educational purposes, and suggestions for improvement.

I very much recommend setting up a mailing list, either
a) a single mailing list for both feature discussions, bug reports, and
announcements of new versions, or
b) a mailing list for announcements, and a separate -devel one for
discussions and bug reports.

Whether you choose a or b is based on how much traffic you expect to have.
I would probably recommend choice a.

How many people have downloaded nightfall? Do you have any regular users?
Building a more cohesive user base is a good way to get real feedback.

I'd be happy to set up one or more mailing lists for you on the seul
majordomo server, and manage them/etc.

>> If you think that a mailing list, webspace, ftp space, a cvs repository, a
>> seul subdomain, etc would be helpful to you, please let me know. Are there
>> rpms or debs available?
>
>There are no rpms or debs, because (i) I dont have the time, and 
>(ii) I don't know about debs, but IMHO rpms are a pain in the ...,
>especially if you don't have root privileges ('package not
>relocateable'), although that might be mainly because they are just
>poorly made sometimes (?). Of course I don't mind if someone else makes
>them available.

I'm currently looking into becoming a debian developer and packager,
because they're missing a lot of educational applications which would
benefit the debian distribution a lot. I'll keep you posted. (Providing
packaged versions of nightfall will increase your user base a lot. Most
educational users are much more willing to try installing a package than
getting a tgz and trying to compile it.)

>best regards,
>  Rainer

--Roger