Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie

[Tal Liron <tal liron gmail com>]

Thank you for your suggestion, but I don't have time to support yet 
another free software project at the moment. (A contribute to and manage 
over 20 projects.) My contributions have been in promoting Genie by 
giving talks about it, as well as opening many bugs. I'm willing to help 
in testing bug fixes.

As for it being "not very difficult", I'm delighted to hear that, but 
unfortunately it does seems difficult, not in terms of programming, but 
in terms of project management. But we've had serious bugs languishing 
for more than a year, and there's no clear plan to fix them or continue 
supporting Genie in the future.

I'm dismayed by the responses here. There's doesn't seem to be anyone 
taking leadership on this issue. For myself, I've decided to abandon 
Genie unless there is a major structural change in terms of managing it. 
I will now need to do the hard work of converting my Genie projects to 
Vala. :(

On 09/08/2013 03:48 PM, Jürg Billeter wrote:
> On Sun, 2013-09-08 at 14:22 +0800, Tal Liron wrote:
> > After some thinking, I want to make this suggestion: Jamie, or anyone
> > else, would it be possible to write a tool to translate Genie files to
> > Vala? I imagine this would not be too hard with the current Genie parser
> > code. This would allow those of us who invested a lot in Genie an easy
> > transition into the mainline. We would just say that Genie was a brave,
> > terrific experiment that ultimately failed.
> It wouldn't be extremely difficult to generate working Vala code. The
> existing valac --dump-tree=foo.vala functionality is not very far away.
> However, even if that was fixed to produce working Vala code, the
> generated code wouldn't be ideal: everything in a single source file, no
> code comments, lower level looping constructs and conditionals, extra
> temporary variables, and maybe more.
>
> I agree with Luca that it would be easier to improve the Genie parser.
> It's written in Vala but it's not very difficult to make changes as it's
> a handwritten parser. Copying a syntactic element from Vala may
> sometimes be as simple as copying a method from valaparser.vala to
> valagenieparser.vala.
>
> The Vala parser is not being modified frequently these days (two commits
> this year so far), so it wouldn't require a big effort to stay in sync.
> If you'd like to continue using Genie, I'd suggest to consider working a
> bit on the Genie parser yourself.
>
> Regards,
> Jürg