Hi Dan,
> Can I jump in to ask some explanations?
I suspect that some people will say that it is off topic here :-)
> To resume the story of (x)Harbour as I have understood it:
>
> Harbour was started by a couple of spanish programmers, A. Linares and
> F. Pulpòn in 1999 as a free Clipper compatible compiler. The idea was to
> be quite conservative toward Clipper.
If you read the Harbour changelog from the bottom up you will see that
there were many developers involved from the very beginning. Viktor was
one of them. Przemek entered in 2002. Ron, Patrick and Luiz were also
there from the beginning.
> The conservative approach caused some disagreement about the way the
> compiler should have been further developed, so we had the xHarbour
> fork, more opened to new language extensions. The developer's list still
> reports P.Czerpak as part of the team, with Ron Pinkas and others
> (notably L.Culik).
>
> In 2009 V. Szakats and P. Czerpak become the main Harbour's
> developers/maintainers.
> So Czerpak left xHarbour and become part of the Harbour team.
Przemek was very active in both projects at the same time. There is for
example one commit message from him in Harbours's changelog in early
2006 that is 623 lines long! That was when he, among many other things,
rewrote the entire GT system.
I believe Przemek dropped out of the xHarbour team a couple of years
earlier than you mentioned and instead brought his new ideas to Harbour,
where the reception was more favourable.
The original Harbour developers had dropped off one by one over the
years, but Viktor and Przemek stayed, and some time between 2006 and
2009 you can say that they became the main developers.
> After some years now we have another fork, Szakats has created his own
> version (Harbour 3.4) while the official Harbour (3.2) now is maintained
> essentially by Czerpak. The funny thing is that xHarbour now appears to
> be the conservative fork, while Harbour is running wild to offer a ton
> of new functions and extensions.
I don't know about "wild" :-) but there are indeed many new features.
> So Szakats left the official Harbour team, it appears. Why?
> What is the reason behind this new fork? What developers are supposed to
> do, use the 3 compilers? Choose one and stick with it?
The latter, I think. Evaluate the options, and the prospects of each of
them, and then settle for one. With different design philosophies
driving each project, I believe it will get increasingly more difficult
to switch back and forth between them as time goes by.
> Why Szakats
> decided to go his way and left the official Harbour? What is the reason
> behind this new fork?
> I was not able to find any answer googling around so maybe someone can
> shed some lights. Klas? :-)
There is a post in a thread in one of the Harbour newsgroups where he
explains it, but lacking distinctive words to feed the search engines it
is hard to find. The general explanation, as I remember it, was that he
was getting tired of all the responsibilities that he had taken upon
himself for so many years and that he wanted to get back to coding just
for having fun. And, I think he also wanted to experiment with things
that were difficult to implement in the official Harbour repository
considering that many existing users would be affected.
Forking per se is not a bad thing, and making it easy to fork is one of
the "selling points" behind Git. There exist several more or less
private Harbour forks on GitHub, created by people who mainly support
the official Harbour version but also want to try some different ideas
on the side. Using GitHub makes those forks easy to use for their
maintainers, and others can see them and discuss them. And as long as
the forks do not diverge too much, it is easy to port updates between them.
What makes Viktor's fork somewhat problematic is, apart from the naming
conflict, that given his high visibility and track record in the
newsgroups for so many years, users who download and try it go on and
discuss it in the Harbour-Users newsgroup. And that creates confusion,
especially among casual visitors to the newsgroup.