delicious cake

It would appear I’m back in the AROS game for a little while. I got a nice email asking for some help with fat.handler so I decided that I’d look into it. In the last 18 months a few things have been broken in things that I care about which were causing my particular configuration to fail to build, so I had to get into the code to fix them. While doing this I started to remember that I actually quite like hacking on AROS and miss it. That and my brain seems ready for a challenge again.

Of course this time around, I’d like to avoid the frustrations that contributed to me quitting) last time. So this is my plan:

• I will only work on things that interest me
• I will not work for money
• I will not take on significant commitments (ie “sure, I can take a look at that bug” is ok, but “sure, I’ll write you a browser” is not)
• I will not get involved in any political stuff like arguments about project governance, goals (backward compatibility) or anything else

The last point is key. There was a few times previously that I had to do things the wrong way just so that backwards compatibility would be maintained, a goal that I never agreed with. This time, I won’t be arguing about it, I’ll just be doing what I want to do. Its a light fork, if you like.

I’ve got a new repository set up over at repo.or.cz. “cake” is what I’m calling my mini-project for now. I’ll be committing everything I do there, as well as keeping the AROS mainline there (manually updated as necessary). I will commit things to the AROS Subversion repository as appropriate, but when I do something that causes significant breakage then it will live here. In true open source fashion, anyone who wants my stuff can get it from me and build their own, or if demand gets high, maybe I’ll provide some builds or something. We’ll see.

So here we go, the brave new world. I’m great at changing my mind, so we’ll see how long this lasts :)