Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

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Skids
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Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by Skids »

Hi,

Can someone point me towards some instructions on what to download and how to install OpenXTalk to run on MacOS BigSur. I've tried downloading what seemed obvious but now have a 1.1Gbyte appimage file that does not seem to do anything. I guess its for a different OS.

Skids (a bear of little brain...)
tergolap
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Re: Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by tergolap »

Skids wrote: Thu Dec 22, 2022 10:58 am ... point me towards some instructions on what to download and how to install OpenXTalk to run on MacOS BigSur. I've tried downloading what seemed obvious but now have a 1.1Gbyte appimage file that does not seem to do anything. I guess its for a different OS.
Hello,

I'm afraid, this won't work at this time. The AppImage does only work on Linux.
As far as I know, currently we do not have a ready to install distribution of oXt for MacOS and Windows. If you are brave, however, there are hints / instruction on how to build it for MacOS and Win. This _should_ work, but I don't know, how much effort you'll have to put in.
I am not familiar with such complex toolchains; therefore, I refuse to set up the build environment for Win or Mac.
Cheers,

T.

I'm not a native speaker, but I try my best.
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richmond62
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Re: Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by richmond62 »

As the appimage for Linux is pretty non-functional we have effectively nothing.
https://richmondmathewson.owlstown.net/
Skids
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Re: Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by Skids »

Ok,

I gained the impression from the road map that OpenXTalk was up and running. However, if it is just Paul I can understand that it will be slow progress.

S
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

The AppImage is NOT non-functional, it needs more work on the Dictionary (which I'm working on a replacement Stack based Dictionary browser now that uses the Dictionarys SQL database directly).
OpenXTalk Engine binaries are still the same as LiveCode Community Edition v.9.6.3 (with the exception of some added meta-data), all of the work has been done on the IDE end, unbranding the LC CE, which is done.

I've worked on this stuff a TON over the last year so I'm a bit insulted by "nothing", nothing is what you're paying and getting from the LiveCode Community Edition, which has been defunct for over a year.

I certainly could use some more help besides Terry and a few others contributions.
At least now I have an unpaid intern (AI) working for me, and its already learned more Extension Builder language than 99% of LiveCode's users.
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

Skids wrote: Thu Dec 22, 2022 2:07 pm Ok,

I gained the impression from the road map that OpenXTalk was up and running. However, if it is just Paul I can understand that it will be slow progress.

S
Yes it has been slow-going. As I've said all along I'm a hobbyist programmer who has a regular 40 hr a week job in a different field. And I've also had to do a lot of research and learning how the IDE ties all of its many parts together, some of it being quite the 'spaghetti' code in need of untangling.
Anyone who thinks they're going to get a rolling release cycle out with 'just me' working on it is fooling themselves. That said, I do work on this as much as I can but sometimes real life-changing things going on in my life have to have higher priority.
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richmond62
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Re: Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by richmond62 »

The AppImage is NOT non-functional
And I did NOT state is was 'non-functional', what I did state was that it was 'pretty non-functional' meaning
that is was sufficiently non-functional, on XFCE (Xubunut) at least to be unusable.
https://richmondmathewson.owlstown.net/
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

richmond62 wrote: Thu Dec 22, 2022 9:30 pm
The AppImage is NOT non-functional
And I did NOT state is was 'non-functional', what I did state was that it was 'pretty non-functional' meaning
that is was sufficiently non-functional, on XFCE (Xubunut) at least to be unusable.
That's why I'm only a bit offended.
Admittedly I had not tested the AppImage with XFCE before uploading it to GitHub, I've been using KDE Plasma and elementaryOS Pantheon lately as those have been the best GUI experience for me on Linuxi (plural?). I have since installed Xubuntu into a VM container for clean-install testing and mostly it's the message box and dictionary problems, although the Dictionary did display for me fine, it has some search box issue that apparently only effects XFCE.

If you could offer some more detailed information about exactly how it's unusable for you and what exactly you are running (version numbers and that sort of thing) or what is installed on you Linux at least as far as what libraries and window manager things are available, that would be great! Various features (like Chromium Embedded Framework which is used in several places in the IDE) have their own dependencies and they aren't the same as what I've seen listed 'over there', which usually seems to list just the minimum dependencies to get basic engine features to work. And the other issues seem to be related to the engines window-modes (palette stack, modeless, modal, etc.) having issues with specific windowing systems. It would be great if we could compile a list of exactly which Desktop Environments / Window Managers have issues and exactly what those issues are. We don't have bugzilla over here, we have 'GitHub Issues' (although I am open to doing something else).

Better then detailed reporting would be to make and share a tool that could collect that information for a user so that they can post it here (or better yet on GitHub repo). I have built the beginnings of a Command-Line-app-browser-GUI stack that may be a good starting point or help developers build such a tool (useful on macOS too).

The Dictionary problems on Linux could become moot, as I have been working on a stack based on something MaxV (who occasionally pops in here) posted about 8 years ago. It's a basic Dictionary browser (no 'Guides' tab) stack that reads directly from API.sqllite database files. Currently the Docs stack uses these DBs to build new web page files that it caches and then caches again, and in LC creates new disk-space-wasting caches for each and every new version (without deleting the old versions cache), but this stack keeps things simple (K.I.S.S.) and reads individual entries directly from the DB file quick, does minimal formatting and then displays it quickly. I had look at using BN's tinyDictionary as an option too, but my issue with that is it is slow to load, tinyDict seems to be building a whole new DB each time it opens, and I had trouble editing the layout which is built around Bernd's 'mod-table-field' thing which is similar to the 'DataGrid' (perhaps OXT could/should include it as an option?), it's has some nice features but maybe more than is needed for a utilitarian stack. The later issue is one that I have with a few otherwise really nice 'add-ons', they try to do too much, more than is needed ( like adding user notes to the DB entries or parsing all of the Extensions add-in docs data all at once), adding bloat and slowing down execution. To my mind being able to find some syntax to use should be as quick of an action as the computer and IDE can possibly do that, and MaxV's dictionary was the closest thing I found to that end. The problems was it's OLD, written for version 7 or 8, and needed to be update to work with v9 as they changed the formatting of the API DB. Additionally I had to modify both of these dictionary stacks to support the difference between LC and OXT (namely the removal of the word 'LiveCode' from the database's API category names). Lastly being a regular stack should make it easy / useful to back-port to say v.7 (for the dusty old ARM7 Raspberry Pi builds). This fast dictionary could become the default, leaving the 'Browser widget webpage dictionary version available as a Preferences option if the user prefers that.

A side note about GitHub
I don't understand the resistance to using GitHub (or GitLab, or whatever.) that seems to prevail. Maybe the reason it seems to be unpopular with this community is because xTalk's stacks have traditionally been binary formats that aren't so version-control-system friendly and so there is less utility to that? I don't know, but I do know you can upload binary files to GitHub just fine, and it has issue tracking and other things useful for collaborative efforts and project management, and GitHub is free for open-source projects to use so that's handy. Theres a lot of really smart people in the xTalk community that genuinely love and care about xTalk language and want to see it being used by the general public at large, if they/we could all just come together to collaborate on this general goal (be the 'Python' of the AI fueled 'natural language' age) it could be "insanely great"!
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

Here is a command-line browser tool stack I've worked on, it's not complete but I work on it as I have a need to use it.
It shows man pages, and/or runs a clicked on CLI with a --help flag attached, so you can quickly find out what each CLI does and it's basic usage and also has a text area for entering custom commands to run with shell() or open process, but be careful (with that axe).
CommandLineBrowser.oxtstack
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

And here is what I have done so far on MaxV's dictionary browser. It's updated for v9.x and modified for OXT's API.sqllite version DB. Currently it should be placed into the same folder as OXT's API.sqllite ( or a cached / copy of that file), it won't work with the LC version of API.sqllite as the main categories names in the DB have the word 'LiveCode' removed from it in OXTs version. It needs some work to make the Entrees display pretty but the key thing for me is that it is FAST at loading and browsing syntax.
OpenXTalk Dictionary.oxtstack
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

Skids wrote: Thu Dec 22, 2022 10:58 am Hi,

Can someone point me towards some instructions on what to download and how to install OpenXTalk to run on MacOS BigSur. I've tried downloading what seemed obvious but now have a 1.1Gbyte appimage file that does not seem to do anything. I guess its for a different OS.

Skids (a bear of little brain...)
Sorry I got distracted from the original topic, that .AppImage version is only for use on Linux OSes, I am planning to upload a macOS version very soon.

I don't think I will be able to keep the releases for different platforms in sync as I had hoped to do. I can only test one platform at a time, and I'm trying to test on bare metal too (as opposed to only testing running on virtual machine).

So maybe I should just start releasing for each platform whenever I think a platform's 'build' is ready for general public testing?

My "daily driver" OSes (since 1987 and probably until I retire in 20 years or so) are macOS so that is inherently the version getting most attention and changes, and It's the platform that the IDE is in the best shape on IMO, usability wise, so I am eager to see hear other people think about it.

The platform that has been getting the second most attention is Linux, because I like FREE (bath 'as in Freedom', and 'as in no-matter-your-economic-circumstances'). Some free UNIX-like OS will be my 'retirement' OS for sure! And I'm going to really want that to be a 'Mac Inspired' Unix-Like OS like elementaryOS (Linux) or helloSystem (FreeBSD with a Ubuntu compatibility overlay).

Windows has historically been my least favorite OS ( but I do think it's cool that MS has become a much more FOSS-freindly company in recent years) and so has gotten the least attention although it seems to run OK. If anyone would like to represent the Windows User here, as a tester or contributer (we need to make an EXE installer), that would be great!
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richmond62
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Re: Git Hub wots zat? or some hand holding please

Post by richmond62 »

Possibly a little bit offended . . .

Now I'll try my hand at being EXTREMELY OFFENSIVE as I have little or no truck with Political Correctness and wish everyone

A HAPPY CHRISTMAS! :D
https://richmondmathewson.owlstown.net/
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