From: Masatsugu Nagata (nagata@KURIMS.KYOTO-U.AC.JP)
Date: 25 Feb 00, 13:09 EST
From: Masatsugu Nagata <nagata@KURIMS.KYOTO-U.AC.JP>
Subject: Who maintains Alpha?
Mark Miller asked:
> This is probably been mentioned before but who is the maintainer of
> Alpha? If you go to Alpha's home page, the author is Peter Keleher
> and the latest version is 7.2 but development versions seem to be
> made by Vince Darley and 7.3 is the latest.
>
Pete Keleher is the author of Alpha. Alpha's core codes (especially
the original text editor engine) is Pete's original creation. Up until
1997, Pete maintained everything -- he improved the application core code
(Alpha), he improved the external Tcl code (AlphaTcl) with help from many
people, including Vince. Alpha 6.52 of June 1997 is the last version
that was fully maintained by Pete.
Since then, Pete got a new job and has become extremely busy. Thus,
Alpha's application core code (Alpha) hasn't changed -- The Alpha 6.52
application and the Alpha 7.3 application are essentially identical
-- except for a few trivial changes, including the addition of many
small icons (for new menus on the menubar), replacement of the Mercutio
MDEF resource with the new version, some dialog resource attributes fix,
version resources, etc.
The difference between 6.52 and 7.3 is (essentially) only in AlphaTcl,
all the external .tcl files. They have been mainly maintained by Vince,
with help from many other people. The main FTP site
<ftp://ftp.ucsd.edu/pub/alpha/> is maintained by Vince.
As I understand it, "Alpha's home page" <http://alpha.olm.net>
is still being maintained by Pete, but the Web site update tends to be
slow, since Pete hasn't much time for it. If the page says 7.2 is current,
Pete would eventually update the information (to refer to 7.3.)
Now, at some point, a new plan emerged, to update Alpha's core application
code to a new version. This project is called "Alpha8", and is maintained
by a group of people ("Alpha Cabal"), but still remains a future plan.
<http://www.his.com/~jguyer/Alpha/Alpha8.html>
Hope this helps.
Mark
--
Mark Nagata
mailto:nagata@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp