Lacrocivious Acrophosist posted on Fri, 20 May 2016 04:17:51 +0000 as excerpted:
> But there is a center of gravity for the Pan project, and now it moves > back to that center, as it has done for decades. That center is Duncan. > > Without Duncan, Pan would not have survived the lean times that have > come more than a few times during Pan's history. Duncan embodies the > institutional history of the project, groks the evolution and > intricacies of Pan in ways that are unique and probably without peer, > and for decades now he has offered quality help to anyone who asks for > it. > > Duncan is Pan's rock against the tides of entropy, and Pan is the better > for it. Is it odd to offer such praise to a non-developer? I don't think > so. Every project needs glue, and continuity, and Duncan has and > continues to provide that, and I for one am very glad he does. Thanks. That is powerful, man! In all humbleness I had thought somewhat the same myself from time to time. Those months and years without a pan dev do get lonely and there was a time when I was actually beginning to wonder if it was time to uninstall pan and shut off the lights on my way out. But fortunately, KHaley, and then Petr Kovar and Heinrich Mueller, came along, and we even got some pretty huge and long on the drawing board features, so pan is in better shape now than it ever was. And in part, they had something to come along /to/, because I was still here as a community nucleus around which a community could re-form. =:^) But it's hugely different coming from someone else, and the way you put it was powerful enough I was even tearing up to some extent! I'll be 50 next year, and while I expect and hope I'll still be around FLOSS and even pan 20 or 30 years from now, when I'm in my 70s (dare I even think 80s?)... Imagine some 80-year-old with a walker or wheelchair in a nursing home running gentoo, and on some mailing list for the pimp- ass-gopher-client... In 30 years that could be me, still holding forth on the possibly otherwise long abandoned list for the pimp-ass- newsreader, which he's running in some container or VM with an old platform as it just doesn't work on wayland 2046 and won't build with gcc 53! (Much as today I still run the only slaveryware app I still run on my computer, the old 1993 DOS edition Master of Orion, in the DOSBox DOS emulator. And given my rate of usage, if they're still around then, I may still be using my current $50 TB block account from astroweb, too. Most of my news usage is actually text, on gmane's list2news servers.) Pimp-Ass Newsreader. It's been a long time since I mentioned what pan actually originally stood for. Back before the C++ rewrite that was introduced as 0.90, I used to insist that the proper form was always all- caps, PAN, because it was an acronym. But the term pimp-ass isn't exactly politically correct these days, and I took the opportunity the 0.90 rewrite introduction presented to switch my self-consistency to the lower-case pan, which is after all both easier to type, and the actual name of the executable. ... Now /what/ were you saying about pan historian?... =:^) Anyway, I've been thinking. I'm old enough now, reality suggest I'm not going to learn C/C++ and be a good developer, as I had hoped years ago when I switched to Linux. And I may or may not eventually switch jobs and be a Linux sysadmin, professionally as well as literally adminning my home systems as I've been doing now since the 16-bit DOS and DOS-based MS Windows era. But you know, just as the Linux and programs I run are the work of literally thousands of people and multiple millions of person-hours, both developer, and artist and documentor and list regular answering my questions and those of others, I really have made a direct difference in at least hundreds of people's lives, if not thousands (there are more lurkers and people later finding answers via google than many appreciate, and indirectly, counting the folks that depend on the systems whose admins I have helped, in the MS groups before the turn of the century and on the Linux lists like the btrfs list I'm on now after, it could be tens of thousands). But it's not just me. It's all the devs and artists and documentors and regulars on the lists, that have helped me and others, just as I too have done. It's all that, that makes the FLOSS community. And I may be just one person in that community of hundreds of thousands, but I'm proud to be able to say I've done my part. And you know what, no matter where or when I die, and no matter what my eulogy states if I'm not just some other unidentified dead guy ITRW (in the real world)... I know that somewhere, someone online is going to be wondering what happened to that Duncan fellow, and missing his help and explanations. And *THAT*, along with pan continuing to live today, is my *REAL* eulogy! Thanks for giving me a glimpse of it, just now. As I said, it's powerful stuff. And what it has given me is the best feeling in the world![1] Now if you will excuse me, there's this liquid on my face I gotta deal with (for about the forth or fifth time writing this)... --- [1] I remember the first time I caught that high. I was still back on the MS IE groups, and someone had been on vacation, to come back and see partial quotes of something I had written, but not my original post, as it had unfortunately already expired. They asked for a /repost/. A repost from !me!! Anybody that has been on newsgroups for awhile... if people are asking for reposts, you've hit it big, and can rightly claim to be among the elite of the elite among posters from that group. And they were asking for reposts of !my!! posts! I was walking on air for a week! Of course this one's a bit different, particularly given where I took it, but it's every bit as powerful! I've some real-world challenges (no I'm not sick, thanks, but moving, the landlady sold the the property to the city to make way, so the renters including me gotta move, but at least the city's paying for the move) coming up, but this will stay with me thru them. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
