All sources of xHarbour.com released

[Ron Pinkas]

For those interested, I just uploaded all of xHarbour.com sources (SQLRDD, Visual xHarbour, xBuild, xEdit, WinAPI, IEGui, xbScript (ActiveScript Host), RushMore, OleServer, xDebugW, XDO, and all other in-house sources, batch files, xBuild scripts, etc., to the xHarbour free public git:

https://github.com/ronpinkas/xharbour

The files were uploaded unmodified as per the latest private repo we had, so Licensing info in the sources was not yet touched, but you are here by granted the right to use all of xHarbour.com sources (Pelles's C excluded!) as per GPL V2. (or later at your choice).

Ron

[Charly 9000]

Thanks Ron for your great worķ.

Charly.

[Diego Pego]

Thanks Ron! This will be a really interesting reading!

[Ron Pinkas]

For those i interested in xbase parsing, using full program abstract syntax tree, many years back I started an[x]Harbour compiler project from scratch, all hand written in ansi C (no yacc/bison) that build a full syntax tree and also have the foundation for adaptive type checking,and optional strong typing. I did not get to code generation, and only started testing, but the parser was fairly complete IIRC. The code can be found in the xHarbourBuilder folder that I uploaded, under a subfolder called x.:

https://github.com/ronpinkas/xharbour/tree/main/xHarbourBuilder/x/Source/Compiler

Ron

[Diego Pego]

Oh that's very nice!!! thank you!!!

[HBQuerier]

Thanks, Ron.

I still can't believe so many tools are disappearing, at least commercially.

Xailer is still in business, I've always loved it.  But I wish xHarbour and its tools were sticking around.

[Ron Pinkas]

Well, we might not like it but I believe its because as a community we made very bad choices. I believe the Clipper language is much more elegant and powerful than say today's latest PHP (even as it was some 15-20 years) ago, but instead of making it easy and accessible to new programmers  we were divided over pedantic bureaucracy like forcing HB_ prefix to any new function, and disallowing extensions to legacy functions to "not break" strict compatibility, forbidding new modern syntax, etc. I am convinced that had we been unified in providing the simplest, friendliest MODERN experience, and instead of inhibiting creativity we would focus our energy on centralized tools/libs repository with tool like PIP, then Clipper derived xBase could have easily been at least one of the top 3 most used languages for business/web applications.

Ron

[Mario Simões Filho]

So it is ...
experience is a beacon that shines for back

Luiz Fernando Verisimo

[Don Lowenstein]

As a long time clipper/harbour developer, I agree 100% with Ron's assessment.

---

From: harbou...@googlegroups.com <harbou...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Ron Pinkas <ronp...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2023 11:31 PM
To: Harbour Users <harbou...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [harbour-users] Re: All sources of xHarbour.com released

 

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[HBQuerier]

Interesting, I didn't know those types of squabbles were going on.  Sorry you had to waste some of your time, dealing with it.

[Ron Pinkas]

Yes, I suppose that in retrospect it seems laughable to object to say NEGATIVE Arguments for String Functions like SubStr() arguing that it would "break error compatibility with Clipper" - I was literally blocked from providing such functionality..Back then even adding support for additional optional arguments to enhance a function like say aScan() was disallowed. :(

Ron

[Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins]

Hi!

Since many years, the github is your friend!
It could have very well made a fork and demonstrated this in practice.

Or you can do that if you currently want to. Better products the company xHarbour.com created but still didn't go forward. 
Even after he opened his source, there was very little interest from programmers in his products, a small highlight for the sqlrdd driver. 
But the Visual-xHarbour IDE is of no interest. 
The fact is that you forked of Harbour and that way of thinking was shown to be WRONG, harmed Harbour and most of the users that were left are coming back, migrating to Harbour. 
No one from the xHarbour team fixed the bugs pointed out by Przemyslaw Czerpak. 
As big a job as the Przemyslaw Czerpak. Viktor Szakats made himself.I don't agree with your point of view, if it's going to break compatibility then change the prefix to hb_ or another one that the "team" in consensus vote for.
That's order and think of the other people migrating their clipper code to Harbour. It was the initial proposal.
Anyway, time has shown that the creation of the fork (xHarbour) was wrong. Behind this event, the interest was simply financial.
It was not a cause by the harbour developer community

Best regards,
Itamar M. Lins Jr.

[Ron Pinkas]

You are obviously entitled to your opinion, and opinions are not a good subject of argument.

For historic accuracy and more complete context, its important for me to share the history of the xHarbour as I experienced and witnessed it:

I created the xHarbour fork back in August 2001, more than 2 decades ago.

I and many other others contributed thousands of hours to xHarbour (witOUT any financial reward). Those contributions brought dozens of significant additions, and improvements over Harbour, in practically every aspect, resulting in the majority of users and development moving to xHarbour.

Harbour was then practically a dormant project, literally without any significant development. For some 4 years, until October of 2005 (when Przemek started refactoring/rewriting significant aspects). For those years almost all of the  development was borrowed from xHarbour.

Then not because of Harbour's  strict bureaucracy, but rather because of it being IDLE and therefor ripe for extensive rewrites (and possibly other personal reasons that are not known to me), late 2005, Przemek (the best programmer I ever knew, and a true force of nature), decided to rewrite most of Harbour code, resulting in amazing core improvements, far superior to xHarbour in those aspects.

Even after those rewrites by Przemek, and even after serious attempts to port as much of xHarbour's extended syntax and features as possible, and even over a decade since my retirement, and even with practically no active development of xHarbour for many years, xHarbour is still used by very successful companies, and independent developers, to develop and maintain significant and  very successful products, to date.

xHarbour.com never infringed on, nor limited xHarbour or Harbour openness in any way, rather it developed tools and functionality that did not exist in the open source space, and directly competed with other similar commercial tools available for both Harbour and xHarbour.

Finally, since you took the liberty to claim that I "harmed Harbour", I must tell you that for anyone other than the very original developers of Harbour's code (which was adopted by the xHarbour fork), to claim that I harmed Harbour is very pretentious.

Ron

[Francesco Perillo]

Hi everybody.

I strongly believe that we should say a big thank you to everyone whose name is listed in the commit history of both Harbour and xHarbour projects.

Using their work, and - as is common to say these days, see RedHat and Terraform license changes - piggybacking on their shoulder a lot of us could earn a living. We (*) are probably too accostumed to have a "free ride" for harbour, libraries and compilers but we (*) ask our clients to pay us. We want open source code but we (*) don't provide the code of our applications to the clients.

I'd like to write a long message but probably I will open new threads so to request your ideas.

To me Harbour has the following problems:

A - project with a too strict, hyper-focused scope of being a clipper clone and some of their extensions (whatever it means since there are several versions of Clipper, class support, etc)

B - project with a too wide platforms and compilers support - despite most users specialize in Windows and one compiler

C - too few programmers worldwide and divided in "self-contained tribes". I use tribes to express the fact that despite using the same base language, they specialized with vertical tools: hbQt, oohg, minigui, minigui extended, hmg, fivewin. I forgot some GUI for sure. What about RDDs? DBFs, netio, pgsql, sqlrdd, sqlit3, odbc, rddsql, letodb, letodbf... I don't think there is even an official list somewhere...

D - too few programmers worldwide and didived by the native language barrier.

E - a lot of "business" programmers and very few "core" programmers: with business programmers the ones that write harbour code for a living and don't have the knowledge, time or willingness to work on harbour compiler/libraries or if they do, they do in their fork (so they don't have to abide to point A)

F - no official contrib/addons repository like PEAR/NPM and the like. addons directory in harbour source code was thought and is supported in hbmk2 for this exact functionality but there is no tool to integrate it - since a lot of "business" programmers don't even compile Harbour themselves, they probably don't even have a addons directory.

G - Clipper syntax is way at the same time too lax and too powerful. Think about the preprocessor: you may USE or dbUseArea() or APPEND BLANK and APPE BLAN are the same command...

H - No new official release, it seems the project is dead after 3.2, but it is actually alive... le'ts say is not dead but can be healthier :-))) No one will take care to release a new version since it will need to be tested for a number of platforms I don't even have access to !!! They may need emulators or VM to test.

I - A lor of contribs are based on obsolete libraries, if you upgrade the library you need to test everything and add all the new API calls.

L - ...

Ok, stop now. I think I expressed clearly what I think about Harbour.

What to do next is unknown to me. Unclear.

Probably we should form a small group of people that delivers a new official version, listing which compilers/s.o. versions/contrib libraries they were tested on.

Then we may probably fork the project, change name, and after a survey and completely drop support for older platforms, compilers, contribs (anyone uses hbcairo???).

We still miss one thing: appassionate "core" programmers... and you don't find them easily...

Francesco

(*) WE is used generically, there are different cases, exceptions, everyone behaves differently.

[Mario Simões Filho]

let me share my experience with xHarbour.com.  back in the early part of the century I found myself with several working systems written in an unsupported language and updates.

  so I started looking for an alternative, I found two Harbor and xHarbour, 

I looked at the update history of both and at the time Harbor was stopped, without commits for over a year, and xHarbour had the option for a fair price hand me a ready-to-use package. 

 I had no doubts, I just have to thank this bunch of good people, xHarbour.com helped me put food on my table and at least forty other families.  and I also made new friends, most of which I don't know personally, unfortunately

[Jose F. Gimenez]

Hi Ron,

how long to "read" you  ;-)

I have to support Ron's arguments. We started Xailer at january 2003, and we used xHarbour from the beggining. There were some features that we loved, like WITH OBJECT, which became a must for us. Of course, there were other ones we didn't like but it was a personal choice to use them or not.

Later, in 2012, we moved back to Harbour. It wasn't an easy decision, but there were 2 strong reasons to do it: xHarbour was stalled while Harbour was reborn (most xHarbour's features were ported to Harbour by Przemek - THANK YOU VERY MUCH for your brilliant work), and many of our users were asking for that. We even wrote a small guide to do it: https://wiki.xailer.com/doku.php?id=en:migrar.de.xharbour.a.harbour. It shows the problems we found while migrating.

Regarding the topic, I belive that the fork was not a wrong move. Everyone should think about that context. Ron wanted to add some extensions while other devs didn't. So, the more logical move was to fork Harbour. As Ron said, xHarbour became the "new standard", while Harbour was (almost) stopped. And so it was for over a decade. Later, many of those extensions were ported back to Harbour by Przemek, and everybody was happy. Without Ron's fork, it's possible that none of those extensions would be in Harbour now; we would have a 32 and 64 bit Clipper, not what Harbour IS today. So, THANK YOU VERY MUCH, Ron.

Regards,

Jose F. Gimenez
http://www.xailer.com

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[Jose F. Gimenez]

Hi Francesco,

I belive that moving Harbour to GitHub was indeed a bad idea. While Harbour was in a SVN repository, everybody had a "single" and "centralized" place to download source and contribute to the project. Since Harbour is in GitHub, anyone who needs a modification just do a fork, and almost no one takes care of pushing it to the "main" repository.

Regards,

Jose F. Gimenez
http://www.xailer.com

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[Ron Pinkas]

Hi Jose, so nice to hear from you too - it sure has been a very long time. :)

 

Many thanks for the kind words Jose,

I jusr read your guide:

   https://wiki.xailer.com/doku.php?id=en:migrar.de.xharbour.a.harbour

I believe it can be beneficial to those xHarbour Users that might consider the move to Harbour. I therefore copied the text to a text file xHarbour-toHarbour.txt and if you give me the permission I will upload it to the root of the xHarbour repository.

Thanks again,

Ron

[Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins]

HI!

The occurrences speak for themselves. Now how much xHarbour is there?
We now have two xHarbour repositories which is official SVN's xHarbour or Ron Pinkas' xHarbour on GitHub?
I have no interest in giving an opinion on anything, I just prefer to follow the facts.
Examples of other attempts that went the same way and failed to succeed Vulcan.net, and other congeners.

Best regards,
Itamar M. LIns Jr.

[Jose F. Gimenez]

Hi Ron,

yes, of course. You may do it. I'm sure it'll be other topics not covered by that guide, but I'm glad to help as long as possible  ;-)

Regards,

Jose F. Gimenez
http://www.xailer.com

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[Ron Pinkas]

On Sunday, September 3, 2023 at 10:31:14 AM UTC-5 Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins wrote:

The occurrences speak for themselves. Now how much xHarbour is there?

 

Apparently more than either os us know - just this last week, on the now DORMANT SourceForge 21 Downloads - 35 Clones this month on GitHub. 

https://sourceforge.net/projects/xharbour/   

We now have two xHarbour repositories which is official SVN's xHarbour or Ron Pinkas' xHarbour on GitHub?

As clearly posted on that "official SVN" you can see the following Button:

   As of 2023-04-09, this project can be found here. https://github.com/ronpinkas/xharbour

I have no interest in giving an opinion on anything, I just prefer to follow the facts.
Examples of other attempts that went the same way and failed to succeed Vulcan.net, and other congeners.

You say you prefer to follow the facts yet you take the liberty to state "facts" which you obviously know nothing about - More than 20 years after i created xHarbour (and  a decade after I retired), and thousands of users still use xHarbour (and xHarbour syntax & extensions, borrowed to Harbour),. To be honest I do not know anything about Vulcan.net nor whom created it, so I don't know if it is indeed a failure like you claim, either.

FWIW, if use Harbour today, then you are directly benefiting from lots of code I contributed before the xHarbour fork, and just as much code that I wrote after the fork (borrowed back to Harbour from xHarbour). Simple fact you may want to consider is that lot's of the syntax and features you take for granted today originated in xHarbour.

BTW, I never even heard your name before this thread, why such personal attacks and clear attempts to ridicule amazingly creative products like VXH and SQLRDD (developed by other amazing programmers, Augusto Infante, and Marcelo Lombardo respectively) - what did I or they ever do to you?

  

Ron

[Rafa Pabd]

I corroborate Ron's words. In its day I was a user of xHarbour. Later I went to Harbour. Perhaps without xHarbour many would have abandoned the "harbour" language
Now I would only ask, if I may, to leave behind old quarrels and tackle the future together. Thank you Ron for your great work

[Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins]

Hi!

Don't take it personally.
There is no mistaking yours and other contributions from many good programmers.
I'm just making it clear that diversity exists and we have to respect that for the greater good of the whole, 
of all, if I'm going to take all the work that started before me and create yet another dissidence, that will have positive or negative consequences.

Best regards,
Itamar M. Lins Jr.

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[Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins]

Hi!

But, of course, I could do all this without having to create a fork, 
I could have done it directly in the Harbour repository. We're not talking about the great work the team at xHarbour has done on behalf of the Harbour "universe".

Best regards,
Itamar M. Lins Jr.

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[José M. C. Quintas]

github is never a problem.

Who wants to contribute, contribute to anything on anywhere.

I have fork of harbour 3.2, harbour 3.4, hmg, oohg, hwgui (fork on github from source-forge)

I contribute to all, when possible, inside my limitations.

But I think that post is about source code from sqlrdd and xharbour.com, do you think it is wrong to save them on github?

José M. C. Quintas

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[Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins]

Hi!

>"facts" which you obviously know nothing about - More than 20 years

Of course, I already used Harbour before the xHarbour fork...

Find by my name Changelog.txt of Harbour.

I read all your fights or discussions in the group they are still accessible.

I watched the rise of xHarbour, was a user and enthusiast of it, and watched its demise.

>2009-06-25 02:58 UTC+0200 Viktor Szakats (vszakats.net/harbour)
> * contrib/hbwin/legacy.prg
>    ! Fixed CreateObject() not working due to typo.
>      Thanks to Itamar Lins for the report.

Best regards,

Itamar M. Lins Jr.

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[Jose F. Gimenez]

Hi José,

GitHub is very good for large and popular projects. But Harbour is not so large nor popular. When Harbour was hosted at Sourceforge (SVN) there was only one repository. Anybody that wanted its changes to were in the repository would ask for write permission or send those changes to a dev with write permission. But always there was only one repository, which everyone used to download in order to compile Harbour.

On GitHub things are very different. Now anyone can clone the repository and make its own changes in it. So, there could be many repositories with many changes along them. There is no repository with all changes inside. That's what Francesco is saying in the other thread. And this is why I belive that GitHub is not a good idea at all for Harbour. That's all.

OTOH, having a cloned repository in GitHub is a good idea indeed, since it gives visibility to the project and help people to download it. It's just like SQLite. SQLite has its own single and centralized repository (using Fossil), and a read-only cloned one on in GitHub, which is updated when any new version is released.

Regards,

Jose F. Gimenez
http://www.xailer.com

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[José M. C. Quintas]

> OTOH, having a cloned repository in GitHub is a good idea indeed, since it gives visibility to the project and help people to download it.

github do this.

What about this?

one click and github moves to cloned repository.

José M. C. Quintas

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[Eduardo Motta]

Ron, I want to publicly thank you for everything you've done for the Harbor/Xharbour community.

I don't think it's fair to point out what could be considered past mistakes, I believe that all the decisions he made were thinking about the best.

The fact is that if today I have thousands of customers using my software, which still has a lot of xharbour code, a good part of that was thanks to their dedication and competence, along with dozens of other programmers who contributed to Harbour/xharbour.

Putting the repository on Github and releasing all the commercial version code proves that you want the best of this fantastic xharbour language.

The best way for everyone would definitely be a MERGE of the Harbor and xharbour projects and that will only be possible without silly discussions that lead nowhere.

Hugs and keep supporting Ron.

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[Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins]

>Yes, I suppose that in retrospect it seems laughable to object to say NEGATIVE Arguments for String Functions like SubStr() arguing that it would "break error compatibility with Clipper" - I was >literally blocked from providing such functionality..Back then even adding support for additional optional arguments to enhance a function like say aScan() was disallowed. :(

Remembering that this is a Harbour "user" forum and it was you who brought up this subject.
And this is a fact!
And not just me but also many other people followed the unfolding of the whole situation during these years.

Best regards,
Itamar M. Lins Jr.

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[Ron Pinkas]

Yes it is a fact that "I suppose that in retrospect it seems laughable...". I did not claim my opinion is a fact it was clearly worded as a personal opinion, and further qualified with "suppose" and "seems". Yes it a fact that I was blocked from implementing such extensions. 

OTOH in your original message the only true facts are the product names and your recognition that the sources of xHarbour.com were released - everything else, and the the very gist of the message has nothing to do with facts:

---------------

"products the company xHarbour.com created but still didn't go forward." 
"Even after he opened his source, there was very little interest from programmers in his products"

"But the Visual-xHarbour IDE is of no interest"

"you forked of Harbour and that way of thinking was shown to be WRONG, harmed Harbour and most of the users"

"Anyway, time has shown that the creation of the fork (xHarbour) was wrong."

"Behind this event, the interest was simply financial. It was not a cause by the harbour developer community"

---------------

Each and every of one of the above quotes are not facts - they are your personal assertions, intentionally worded as assertive unqualified claims, They are worse than opinions because you were never privy to any statistics of xHarbour.com or xHarbour.org that could have explained your claims as opinions, let alone facts. They are therefore baseless speculations, grounded in some personal animosity, nothing more. The fact is the in decade of years 2001-2011 xHarbour was a leading Clipper compatible implementation, used and loved by thousands of developers (apparently including you yourself).

You personally attested that I argued and "fought" to convince the development team, and yet I failed - so HOW exactly can you support the "fact" that I could I have achieved all that I did manage to achieve with xHarbour (much but not all of it later borrowed by Harbour) without the fork you so despise (yet mysteriously admitted to have used yourself)? Personal politics inerfered with creativity and not only blocked me from contributing more than I did, they even DELETED great contributions for no apparent reason other than personal animosity - for example what happened to 'contrib/dot/'? This was a full implementation of Clipper Processor + Full Clipper Interpreter + Full DOT Environment developed in 100% Clipper language - was it bad for Harbour? Was it against any agreement? Did the person deleting it (BTW withOUT any ChangeLog entry that I can find) di it for the benefit of the Harbour Users community?

When I responded to your original reply, saying that you are entitled to your opinion, you again pretended to state facts not opinions:

---------------

"I have no interest in giving an opinion on anything, I just prefer to follow the facts."

---------------

And, yet again, each and every statement in that very message is either a cynical assertion, and/or personal speculations masqueraded as "facts":

---------------

"The occurrences speak for themselves. Now how much xHarbour is there?"

"We now have two xHarbour repositories which is official SVN's xHarbour or Ron Pinkas' xHarbour on GitHub?"

"Examples of other attempts that went the same way and failed to succeed Vulcan.net, and other congeners."

---------------

This is indeed an Harbour User group, and I came here specifically to help Harbour by advising its developers and users that I releases all pf xHarbour.com's sources, because even it there "very little" interest it may still be beneficial to someone. I further believe that the sources of VXH (which is not only an IDE but a FULL Windows GUI RTL) may be of great interest to someone even if you claim that VXH "is of no interest".

In summary I have as much right to post here, even if you claim that I "harmed Harbour", and even if you don't like my opinions - at least I don't pretend they are facts.. 

Ron

[Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins]

Hi!

>(yet mysteriously admitted to have used yourself)

I'll use whatever works best in my little world of knowledge.
Are you the owner of xHarbour or Harbour by any chance?
I stopped using xHarbour after Przmek left. If he goes back to xHarbour maintenance I can use it again. I am free to choose.

>Personal
> politics inerfered with creativity and not only blocked me from 
>contributing more than I did, they even DELETED great contributions for 
>no apparent reason other than personal animosity - for example what 
>happened to 'contrib/dot/'?

I see that there is confusion on your part, I believe that you must think that you are the owner of something in the Harbour for having undoubtedly helped in its development.
Na prevents you from demonstrating that you are right in what you say. You could have created another repository in SVN/GIT like we have Minigui/Hwgui etc... That the community will see and approve of your work.
And even pay for it if necessary.

Best regards,
Itamar M. Lins Jr.

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[Ron Pinkas]

On Sunday, September 3, 2023 at 4:40:22 PM UTC-5 Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins wrote:

I see that there is confusion on your part, I believe that you must think that you are the owner of something in the Harbour for having undoubtedly helped in its development.

The confusion is yours, since I was indeed the sole owner of that contribution. namely the /contrib/dot' contribution. 

Na prevents you from demonstrating that you are right in what you say. You could have created another repository in SVN/GIT like we have Minigui/Hwgui etc... That the community will see and approve of your work. And even pay for it if necessary.

You keep demonstrating further confusion - xHarbour was indeed just another SVN repository on SourceForge - same as Harbour, available to everyone, under the exact same terms.

Ron

[Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins]

Hi!
Here -> https://sourceforge.net/projects/xharbour/ i found this:
xHarbour is a portable implementation of the Clipper/xBase language (Compiler & complete Run-time libraries). It's practically 100% backward compatible with CA-Clipper 5.2e and 5.3c, and offers many modern language extensions, and extensive Run-time libraries.

Well, if I understand correctly... I'll cut this short. Where is this dot -> "like .net" extension working in xharbour ?

>it seems laughable to object to say NEGATIVE Arguments for String Functions like SubStr() arguing that it would "break error compatibility with Clipper" - I was literally blocked from providing such >functionality..Back then even adding support for additional optional arguments to enhance a function like say aScan() was disallowed. :(

Or do you mean that xHarbour is that? But you said it wouldn't be backwards compatible with the clipper language. substr(), functions... etc... Would break compatibility...

Best regards,
Itamar M. Lins Jr.

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[Ron Pinkas]

On Sunday, September 3, 2023 at 6:47:23 PM UTC-5 Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins wrote:

Well, if I understand correctly... I'll cut this short. Where is this dot -> "like .net" extension working in xharbour ?

DOT is "like .net" I never said such thing - it's a a quot you fabricated from your own wild imagination. I did clearly explained what the DOT contribution was - here is the real quote:

"This was a full implementation of Clipper Processor + Full Clipper Interpreter + Full DOT Environment developed in 100% Clipper language"

Apparently you confused the "DOT Environment" term which in the xBase world means a DBASE III DOT PROMPT Environment" look alike. In other words it an Application which allows the user (developer) to enter xbase commands in an INTERACTIVE Interpreter  so you can OPEN DBFs performs SEEK operations, RUN EReports with the LIST commands, and much more. The prompt of the environment is  the DOT CHARACTER '.' so it xalled a DOT Prompt Enironment or a DOT Environment. Clipper never had such tool, instead it bundled the DBU application. My implementation was far superior in hat it provided a FULL dBase like DOT Environment, which is even more powerful than the original DOT prompt, because it offered full support for practically 100% of the language. Additionally the same app could literally RUN practically 100% of Clipper/Harbour code as an interpreter,. It also has full Clipper compatible Pre-Processor and it was all written in pure Clipper. Even other projects not related to Harbour borrowed it. yet mysteriously it was DELETED from the Harbour repository.

This important application is available in xHarbour repository, here: https://github.com/ronpinkas/xharbour/tree/main/utils/xbscript

  

>it seems laughable to object to say NEGATIVE Arguments for String Functions like SubStr() arguing that it would "break error compatibility with Clipper" - I was literally blocked from providing such >functionality..Back then even adding support for additional optional arguments to enhance a function like say aScan() was disallowed. :(

Or do you mean that xHarbour is that? But you said it wouldn't be backwards compatible with the clipper language. substr(), functions... etc... Would break compatibility...

YES, xHarbour does support "NEGATIVE Arguments for String Functions like SubStr()", and no it does not "break compatibility", as you must know having used xHarbour. The argument against such extension was that it would "break ERROR COMPATIBILITY", meaning that if you pass NEGATIVE Argument Clipper would produce an Error but the extension would instead NOT produce an error. If you read those past arguments like you claim, then you should at least understand such basic concepts as "Error Compatibility" vs. "Compatibility" before voicing an opinion about my decision to fork (more than 20 years ago).

Ron

[HBQuerier]

Ron,

Vulcan.net was the successor to Visual Objects, and it's pretty accurate to say it failed.  I remember paying for the damn thing, finding the documentation wanting, and receiving almost no support.

It's been superceded by XSharp, which supports the Vulcan.net dialect, as well as Foxpro and others.  It looks like XSharp is here to stay.

[Jose F. Gimenez]

José,

yes, that is the problem IMHO:



203 forks! How many changes are lost out there! I'm sure that many changes could be of interest/benefit for Harbour project, but instead, they are commited here and there, with no interest at all in sending those changes to the main repository  :-(

IMHO, all we should aim for a single and centralized repository. Let's "make Harbour great again"  ;-)

Regards,

Jose F. Gimenez
http://www.xailer.com

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[Eduardo Motta]

Jose, the forks are linked to the main repository. All it takes is for whoever made the fork to make a pull request.

The reference is never lost.

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[Francesco Perillo]

I was browsing the repository this morning. I noticed that there are a lot of forks, but almost all of them are not used.

There is one repository for a gui that is actively developed (GTNAT) and a couple of others where changes are very few and specific to the developer environment.

One tries to replace the standard global error handling but I can't understand why :-))))

Here the harbour commits. After a spike during hbQt development and Viktor refactoring (ended in a fork, anyway) there are very few commits.

To me, it means that Harbour reached its goal, the compiler is good and working.

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[José M. C. Quintas]

On one of your posts, you mention about to use a modified harbour for Xailer.

May be you can answer why you do not want forks, but have your own fork.

José M. C. Quintas

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[Daniele Campagna]

First of all, thanks to Ron for the big contribution he has given to Harbour and xHarbour.

I remember very well the whole history (from a user's POW) and witnessed the events,  as Ron resumed them. I started using Harbour since version 0.43. The compiler (pseudo-compiler we should say to be pedantic as Itamars seems to be)  was in its infancy. I think that at the time it was mainly made by its creator Antonio Linares, and the goal was (rightly) to offer the Clipper compatibility 100%.
After some years we had version 0.99, a really stable and complete piece of software. More or less at the same time I needed to port a couple of medium-sized programs from Clipper/DOS to Windows. One problem with Clipper was the "incompatibility" of Clipper executables with multi-tasking new OSes from Microsoft. (Windows NT and Windows 2000). Clipper programs appeared as resource-hungry even when in idle state. I found eventually a little program that was able to patch the idle time management (the patch had to be run vs. the executables once compiled). Another problem was the 16-bit limit. Harbour was a 32-bit "compiler" and that was a big advantage, in perspective.

The point that was missed is that it's OK to port a Clipper program to Windows and give it much more memory available, increased dbf size etc, but a Windows user hardly would have been satisfied with the classical 80x25 console mode. xHarbour offered the amazing GTWVW lib (missing in Harbour) and an improved and powerful syntax, while keeping the sacred compatibility with Clipper more or less intact. And the commercial version had this amazing xBuilder and a way to design forms and controls more or less as Delphi, that in between had become a big success. So xHarbour seemed as a "Delphi for xBase", not a stupid idea at all.

I remember to have choosen xHarbour + GTWVW + HWGUI as the quickest way to port my programs to Windows. Yes, still the console mode, but with a decent font, some colors, the user able to choose console and font size, and the use of Windows APIs to choose printer, preview the printouts, and even call the Calculator from inside my program was a big step forward. Pseudo-console windows had a toolbar too, and a windows-style menu, to make clear even to the less careful user that it was not a console application, it was a Windows application that strangely resembled a console application :-)

At the time xHarbour was the main engine leading the development, while Harbour was sleeping. From time to time some pieces of code were ported from xHarbour to Harbour. Also, I remember Ron as a passionate contributor, often changes, improvements and corrections were signed by him. I choose to use xHarbour for the development of desktop (Windows) programs, and to use Harbour for web applications. A solomonic decision to stay in touch with both compilers and "see what will happen".

The whole idea of xHarbour was a logical one and also the idea of a standard GUI was a good one. It's completely useless to say today, after 20+ years, that the decision was ill-fated. The core developers of Harbour were too zealous toward the idea of "Clipper compatibility before all".

BTW, there are still some nice features of xHarbour that are IMHO more friendly/useful/better implemented than in Harbour, as DLL management, RegEx, the calling a function via its pointer... just my opinion.

If I today speak about Harbout to someone, the compatibility with Clipper is the LAST thing I say.

"Oh, BTW it's also compatible with an old powerful language... ever heard of Clipper?"
"Clipper? Naah..."
"OK, forget about it..."

I was quite sad when xHarbour.com went out of businesses. I never purchased the commercial product but I think that I owe something to xHarbour project. A big thank to Ron for this last effort to keep alive xHarbour.

BTW I downloaded v.1.2.3 from Github and compiled with MINGW 8.1 - OK

My 2 cents

Dan

Il 03/09/2023 00:18, Ron Pinkas ha scritto:

You are obviously entitled to your opinion, and opinions are not a good subject of argument.

For historic accuracy and more complete context, its important for me to share the history of the xHarbour as I experienced and witnessed it:

I created the xHarbour fork back in August 2001, more than 2 decades ago.

I and many other others contributed thousands of hours to xHarbour (witOUT any financial reward). Those contributions brought dozens of significant additions, and improvements over Harbour, in practically every aspect, resulting in the majority of users and development moving to xHarbour.

Harbour was then practically a dormant project, literally without any significant development. For some 4 years, until October of 2005 (when Przemek started refactoring/rewriting significant aspects). For those years almost all of the  development was borrowed from xHarbour.

Then not because of Harbour's  strict bureaucracy, but rather because of it being IDLE and therefor ripe for extensive rewrites (and possibly other personal reasons that are not known to me), late 2005, Przemek (the best programmer I ever knew, and a true force of nature), decided to rewrite most of Harbour code, resulting in amazing core improvements, far superior to xHarbour in those aspects.

Even after those rewrites by Przemek, and even after serious attempts to port as much of xHarbour's extended syntax and features as possible, and even over a decade since my retirement, and even with practically no active development of xHarbour for many years, xHarbour is still used by very successful companies, and independent developers, to develop and maintain significant and  very successful products, to date.

xHarbour.com never infringed on, nor limited xHarbour or Harbour openness in any way, rather it developed tools and functionality that did not exist in the open source space, and directly competed with other similar commercial tools available for both Harbour and xHarbour.

Finally, since you took the liberty to claim that I "harmed Harbour", I must tell you that for anyone other than the very original developers of Harbour's code (which was adopted by the xHarbour fork), to claim that I harmed Harbour is very pretentious.

Ron

On Saturday, September 2, 2023 at 2:55:34 PM UTC-5 Itamar M. Lins Jr. Lins wrote:

Hi!

Since many years, the github is your friend!
It could have very well made a fork and demonstrated this in practice.

Or you can do that if you currently want to. Better products the company xHarbour.com created but still didn't go forward. 
Even after he opened his source, there was very little interest from programmers in his products, a small highlight for the sqlrdd driver. 
But the Visual-xHarbour IDE is of no interest. 
The fact is that you forked of Harbour and that way of thinking was shown to be WRONG, harmed Harbour and most of the users that were left are coming back, migrating to Harbour. 
No one from the xHarbour team fixed the bugs pointed out by Przemyslaw Czerpak. 
As big a job as the Przemyslaw Czerpak. Viktor Szakats made himself.I don't agree with your point of view, if it's going to break compatibility then change the prefix to hb_ or another one that the "team" in consensus vote for.
That's order and think of the other people migrating their clipper code to Harbour. It was the initial proposal.
Anyway, time has shown that the creation of the fork (xHarbour) was wrong. Behind this event, the interest was simply financial.
It was not a cause by the harbour developer community

Best regards,
Itamar M. Lins Jr.

--

[Jose F. Gimenez]

Eduardo,

yes, I know. But IMHO the main problem remains... there are too many clones with (probably) changes which are not sent to the primary repository.

What I'm trying to say is that this working way doesn't benefit to Harbour.

Regards,

Jose F. Gimenez
http://www.xailer.com

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[Jose F. Gimenez]

Francesco,

It's good to know that there are no such many active repos nor so many changes outside. In either case, I still belive that this working way doesn't help  :-(

And I agree to you that Harbour is very good and working!

Regards,

Jose F. Gimenez
http://www.xailer.com

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/harbour-users/CADPHLr-P78z3xrEOznx9atmas8imd2kLdOB%2BaE5S4ABReBNkfw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jose F. Gimenez]

José,

what post? I belive you're talking about this (in our wiki):



Have you checked it? Have you downloaded our binaries to check it?
That version is from 2012 or 2013 (ten years ago), and if you download it you may see that the source code of that module is shipped in it. Just as asked by the Harbour (and GPL) license.

Since then, there is no Harbour's module modified by us. We provide our binaries in order to have a Harbour compiled with the flags we need, and we state that only those binaries are supported by us. That's all.

Regards,

Jose F. Gimenez
http://www.xailer.com

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/harbour-users/aa0c8634-40a7-6afa-2dfe-299c93356023%40gmail.com.

[marcosgambeta]

FP> I was browsing the repository this morning. I noticed that there are a lot of forks, but almost all of them are not used.

Hi Francesco,

To be more exact:

203 forks

-

132 inactive forks (never updated)

=

71 active forks

Regards,

Marcos Antonio Gambeta

[José F. Giménez]

José,

I've reread my post and it sound a bit rude. I apologize for that. English is not my native language.

What I was trying to say is that there was only once that we need to modify a Harbour's module. It was when we were migrating from xHarbour, and we complied al 100% the Harbour license. A few time later, with the invaluable help from Przemek, we found a way to do it with an un touched Harbour, so we dropped our modification. Since then, we're compiling our Harbour binaries without any modification.

Regards,

Jose F. Gimenez
http://www.xailer.com

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/harbour-users/4790d98f-20f8-949a-8d2b-7429b4cf5053%40gmail.com.

[Jose F. Gimenez]

José,

I've reread my post and it sound a bit rude. I apologize for that. English is not my native language.

What I was trying to say is that there was only once that we need to modify a Harbour's module. It was when we were migrating from xHarbour, and we complied al 100% the Harbour license. A few time later, with the invaluable help from Przemek, we found a way to do it with an un touched Harbour, so we dropped our modification. Since then, we're compiling our Harbour binaries without any modification.

Regards,

Jose F. Gimenez
http://www.xailer.com

El 04/09/2023 a las 19:13, Jose F. Gimenez escribió:

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/harbour-users/4790d98f-20f8-949a-8d2b-7429b4cf5053%40gmail.com.

[HBQuerier]

Hi Francesco,

Do you have a link to GTNAT?  Is it Window GUI, or text mode?

I've been searching for a decent comprehensive Text Mode Harbour IDE, for a while.  There was a small one, I forgot where it was, but it didn't actually do anything.

[Francesco Perillo]

This is the repository:

https://github.com/frang75/harbour_nappgui, under contrib

[HBQuerier]

This is a fork of Harbour.

It looks like you're referring to gtnap, rather than  GTNAT.

Looks like I'll have to set some environment variables to build it, but I think I understand what you're referring to.

[Francesco Perillo]

Now there are 204 forks :-)

Here the graph of the forks with the commits

https://github.com/harbour/core/network 

Please have a look at some of the forks that are active, the commit messages are really interesting.

[Ron Pinkas]

2023-09-13 12:58 UTC-0500 Ron Pinkas <ronpinkas/AT/gmail/com>

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlmy.prg

* Missed from last commit

2023-09-13 12:35 UTC-0500 Ron Pinkas <ronpinkas/AT/gmail/com>

+ xHarbour-to-Harbour.txt

+ New text file borrowed from: https://wiki.xailer.com/doku.php?id=en:migrar.de.xharbour.a.harbour

/*

Thanks to Jose F. Gimenez

*/

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/compat.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/compat.h

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/exprobjs.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/exprrelation.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/exprtransl.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/firebird.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/firebird3.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/oraclip.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/oraedit.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlact.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlconnection.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlex1.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlex1ora.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlex2.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlex2ora.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlex3.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlex3ora.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlfirebird.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlfirebird3.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlgen1.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlmaria.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlodbc.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlpgs.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlrdd.hbx

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlrdd0.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlrdd1.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlrdd2.prg

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/sqlsrodbc.c

* xHarbourBuilder/xHarbour-SQLRDD/source/utils.prg

! Fixes by Przemyslaw Czerpak to compile with Harbour

/*

Thanks to Przemyslaw Czerpak

*/

On Friday, August 18, 2023 at 2:03:58 PM UTC-5 Ron Pinkas wrote:

For those interested, I just uploaded all of xHarbour.com sources (SQLRDD, Visual xHarbour, xBuild, xEdit, WinAPI, IEGui, xbScript (ActiveScript Host), RushMore, OleServer, xDebugW, XDO, and all other in-house sources, batch files, xBuild scripts, etc., to the xHarbour free public git:

https://github.com/ronpinkas/xharbour

The files were uploaded unmodified as per the latest private repo we had, so Licensing info in the sources was not yet touched, but you are here by granted the right to use all of xHarbour.com sources (Pelles's C excluded!) as per GPL V2. (or later at your choice).

Ron