(Reposted, I think the first one went to BBS-local message group,
oops.)
A month ago I started working on qodem again, with the goal of taking
it from the barely-working 1.0alpha to a solid reliable 1.0beta
release.
This is after a very long three-year gap in development, driven by
multiple work-related moves in my meatspace life. This is the longest
such gap but certainly not the first: there have been many gaps
spanning from 6 to 18 months since I started qodem in 2003. It is
time for me to recognize that the unusual events in my life between
2003-2006 that supported qodem's development are unlikely to happen
again. So I have decided to do several things for qodem and the wider
BBS / command line terminal community:
1. I am paying off nearly all of qodem's technical debt. The code
base has gone through a monstrous update including code style,
internal documentation, cleaning up loose ends, and performing most
of the big refactorings that I have been putting off. The new code
base is much easier to read and (crossing fingers) easier to
maintain for the long haul.
2. I have made Windows a top priority. The 1.0beta will feature full
feature parity between Windows and Linux (including serial ports)
and a Windows installer that will include the most recent Internet
BBS list. I am using Borland 5.02 for now, but will also verify
that the code will work with Visual C++ 6.0. The goal is to work
with all versions of Windows since Windows 95.
3. As of May 26, 2015, the qodem code base has been dedicated to the
public domain. (CC0 for those jurisdictions that don't recognize
public domain.) This is as "free" as one can make anything: anyone
who wants to make commercial closed-source products out of this
code is now legally free to do so.
The qodem github repository is here:
https://github.com/klamonte/qodem
If you are a developer who finds something interesting and I didn't
document it well enough to figure out quickly, please let me know and
I will try to do better.
The 1.0beta is still another 4-8 weeks out, but it is on the way. I
have about a dozen real bugs to fix, a revert back to cryptlib, a new
autoconf build system (with corresponding updates for the deb and rpm
builds), and a few other minor things.
The one thing it will not have is the ability to answer the phone for
host mode. If someone out there has an ssh-accessible landline and
modem I could test with, I could probably get that in. qodem 1.0beta
would then be a complete superset of Qmodem 5.0 (well, scripts are
different but that is by design).
- Kevin Lamonte
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