Creating a fork.

[Praful Mathur]

Hey Ritchie, 

How are you? I know the software is unmaintained so I was wondering what would be the best option to fork the source. Would it be best to create a fork on Github, make changes, and then send you a PR via gitorious? It's a great piece of software and with a few changes, we could greatly increase usability. 

I'd like to add real-time collaboration, fix some logic, add exporting to Final Draft Pro format, and update the UI. It'd be great if you could walk me through the code and how it works. Additionally, where are parts you'd like me to start diving into immediately.

Again, this is an awesome piece of software and I really appreciate your work. 

Thank you,

Praful 

[Ritchie Wilson]

Pratful

Thanks for writing, and I'm glad you're interested in the project. Let me give you a quick rundown of the situation.

At this point I only touch Rawscripts on the off chance things catastrophically break. I don't have the time to do anything else with it, which means I cannot take pull requests. However, the whole thing is under the AGPL license. You are free to take the code and do pretty much whatever you want with it. You can make improvements, start your own site with it, add features, whatever.

Now the more practical advice. Rawscripts was my first software project. It is how I learned to write code. That means the code is a broken, janky mess. It's bad code, bad design, bad technologies, uncommented, unreadable, and has no tests. On top of that, I have done only the most basic of bug fixes in the past three years, and so that bad code is also outdated. Whenever I've tried to fix these larger problems, it would mean basically starting from scratch. There is very little which can be salvaged. It's difficult to do even simple fixes for fear that it breaks the site for everyone. If I were you, I wouldn't touch this software which was unmanageable three years ago and has been bit-rotting since.

That said, this is still something I care about, and I want to help you best I can. If you really want to work on the existing code, I can try to show you around. And if you want to start something from scratch, I'd be happy to let you know the kinds of things I've run into for the past five years. Starting from scratch may not be too difficult, as there are a lot better libraries out there now than when I started. Either way, let me know how I can help.

Cheers,

Ritchie

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