Frustrated !

Hi folks,

You are all come with interesting inputs, - the problem is for me to
follow you. I don't know what has happen, but onelist seems to
send mail at different hours than before. I am a bit out of sync.
And I never received digest #217 at all. ( Had to look for it at the
archives, and the printout cuts away a lot of what you have written,
because onelist has used a wider margin. Then again when I don't
have it in the mailbox, - even more complicated )

I have prepared a new list for software topics, but have not made it
official yet. ( and I am not sure if I should at all )

CAD: There is 4-5 projects under Linux for this.
CAM: We may define this differently.

G-codes: There is no big problem to make such a program. It looks
like there is enough people that could help out on the work.
The big problem is to manage it, to form a constructive team, and
define everything. This is what I am most concern about at the
moment. The GPL stuff add to this, because the reward is "happy
faces", and that is much more difficult to master, than just pay
someone a salary.

I did write a sort of automated package once, - and had to do all
kind of tricks to make a background program, work on data from the
geometric data base in AutoCad. I was a nightmare, but I got
something working, and it would output data to the machine control.

Because I gained some ideas, how things could work, - some of my
comments may seem "out of the ordinary". But here is some of the
root to why I did like Varkon, and other packages, that is made
modular, and you have access to the data base. ( This was not
written in order to sound smart, - just to explain why I sometimes
raise strange questions )

Bertho wrote:

> It would be great if there was a mini-listing of different

software and what they do.

> As new ones are found, they could be added to the listing.

YES !

The thing is, we are not going to reinvent the wheel. But in order
to sort out what we would like, what others have made available,
- this would be very helpful.

Several have already defined a lot of "how they" work, - and they
have already split it up into "phases". This is making it easier
to see how to define the tasks.

I noticed a remark from Jon Elson: he had 18 years of ..... Good,
I don't argue. But it is very clear that others tend to do strange
things, and want to do them. They also have some weird machines,
etc. Here is where I like the concept of something modular in a CAM
application, but it may be too difficult. I don't know. And I
also have something in the back of my mind: Many new things have
come from people doing stuff - that none of the smart guys thought
were possible. My point here is that some seems to hold back a bit,
because they feel that they don't have the knowledge.

I have never, and will never even think of what I write as a
competition of who is smart. And no one should be afraid to raise
any stupid question, or topic.

If I am out of line here, then forgive me. I am a bit confused, -
because I fell out of sync, and it is too much work to patch
everything into place again.

As a last remark: We will have nice applications to go along with
what we like to do. It all takes a bit of time, but there is several
groups that work on these things. But Bertho has come up with
several good things, and the thing I quoted him on, is something I
have tried to point out earlier. We are not up to date on what the
Linux community is doing, - and some of what we look for, may
already be there.

//ARNE