fuck it. i'm declaring project bankruptcy with rslight-tomo.
😆 😭
after futzing around with tomo's (rslight-based) code for the afternoon, i realized that it's such an ensnarled mess that it's not worth trying to untangle the old rslight code from the tomo code i wrote over the last couple of years
it reminds me a little of the source code for adventure game studio - a game building IDE that is over 20 years old.
at some point open source projects have changed hands so many times that it's like trying to renovate a 300 year old house. the foundation was built in the 16th century by louise, the bedrooms in the 17th by raoul, and the bathrooms in the 18th by edward. you need to run new electrical wiring throughout the house, but none of it was ever built to accommodate conduits in the stone walls.
you don't know why louise, raoul or edward designed things the way they did, and you can't ask them now. but you assume there was some kind of rationale to their decisions, so you work around their messes. it seems ok at first. the wiring runs on top of the stonework, but you've found a way to hide it in the crown moulding. you've got it running dangerously close to the water pipes, and god forbid you ever have to fix a broken wire, because you couldn't use conduit anywhere.
after years of blood, sweat and tears, you've got howl's moving castle. your friends who visit call it quaint, but no one really wants to live there.
that's what happened with RSLight. it was originally written by Florian Amrhein in 1999 until the mid-2000s. then over a decade later, Retro Guy picked it up and began extending those php scripts with his own particular code.
and then i picked it up in 2023, and began trying to rewrite *both* retro guy's and florian's code.
the truth is: louise and raoul and edward never knew what they were doing in the first place. they were all renovators just like me, using their meagre knowledge to solve problems particular to their time and place. the house was never built to accommodate the 21st century.
it's not pretty. and worse, it's not maintainable. other people love howl's castle precisely because they don't have to live there; howl does.
#tomo #nntp #programming