Re: [As-users] upgrading

Sasha Vasko (sasha@aftercode.net)
Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:24:33 -0600 



Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
Hello old friend :)


> As something of an oldbie around AfterStep (I'm the same Andrew
> Sullivan mentioned in the FAQ), I was surprised to learn that,
> with 2.0, there's been another Grand Unified Configuration Scheme
> change.  (I haven't trolled the list archives looking for the

Nothing of the sorts :) The only big change was to revert back from 
~/GNUstep/L/A nonsense to more standard ~/.afterstep.

I tried my best to keep AS as backwards compatible as possible, and 
considering that it was rewriten almost completely within last years, I 
think I did a good job at it. There are some oddities though due to the 
fact that many internal mechanisms were changed, and don't emulate old 
bugs :) All the new features were incremental as far as config files go.

If you wish I could try and work with you to fix as many problems as 
possible though, so feel free to submit me descriptions, along with your 
configs etc.  Usefull thing also is to compile afterstep with 
--enable-gdb configure flag. That causes it to produce HUGE amount of 
trace info, which is valuable for debugging. Start afterstep as : 
afterstep -l ~/afterstep.log, then gzip the log after session is 
completed, and e-mail it to me ( don't post on ML ).

Something tells me though that you will be better off trying supplied 
look/feels that do take advantage of many a new features, and then 
altering whichever one you like best to your liking. After all there 
were lots of changes in the world in last 6 years, and I tried my best 
to keep up with it. All the new features implemented were nothing but 
dictated to me by the user feedback.

> reasoning.  I will tell you, however, that I'll bet you'll get a
> bunch of angry emails in around 6 months when everyone's old configs
> stop working.  We had the same problem during the 1.4 releases,
> and ISTR that the flameage from that was one of the reasons Guyhelm
> stopped working on the project.  In case it matters, I rather wish

Well AfterStep users were kind to me in that regards so far, maybe 
becouse they got tired of flaming long time ago :) Then again perhaps 
lack of commitment on Guylhem's part was the reason, not the flaming.

> you hadn't done this.  But I'm not contributing, so it's not like I
> can complain.)

I could also had been hibernating all this years :)

> It appears that the Debian maintainer has decided to move 2.x into
> the testing distribution, which causes me pain because all my old,
> carefully maintained config files, which have followed me around now

Ohh, c'mon it can't be that bad. I don't suppose you had fancy ASCII art 
in them.

> for going on 6 years, are now worthless.  There seems to be very
> little in the documentation (which itself is sort of sparse) about
> how to upgrade from an older version to 2.x without having to create
> all new config files from scratch.  Have I missed it somewhere?  An

Most of the old config options should work as before, unless you still 
cling to ancient Texture options that were obsolete for ages.

> RTFM link is fine, I just need to know where to look.  (I already

You can read NEW file in the distro.
Supplied look/feel files do have nice comments in them, and also if you 
were to check web site you might have noticed this:

http://www.afterstep.org/visualdoc.php?show=visualselect

> wasted an hour this morning in a somewhat fruitless go at this
> problem.  For the time being, I've recompiled 1.8 locally and
> installed that; but package management is the whole reason I'm using
> Debian.)

> Thanks,
> A

Sasha Vasko

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