The history of tmux

[David Chanters]

Hey everyone,

I'm really enjoying tmux, and thank you to everyone who makes it possible!

What's the story behind tmux, and how did it start? Having read the
tmux FAQ, it's clear the author wasn't keen on the gnu screen code.
What difficulties were encountered in writing tmux from scratch?

tmux being some kind of mediator between the terminal and the
application running in tmux, is that where a lot of the challenges
come from?

To what extent has outside participation helped tmux? Is there a large
developer community surrounding this? Are there any cool features
which are going to be making an appeareance soon?

Thanks for your patience and time!

David

[David Chanters]

Hi,

Did this email make it to the list? Any takers on this?

David

On 5 February 2015 at 22:10, David Chanters

Post by David Chanters
Hey everyone,
I'm really enjoying tmux, and thank you to everyone who makes it possible!
What's the story behind tmux, and how did it start? Having read the
tmux FAQ, it's clear the author wasn't keen on the gnu screen code.
What difficulties were encountered in writing tmux from scratch?
tmux being some kind of mediator between the terminal and the
application running in tmux, is that where a lot of the challenges
come from?
To what extent has outside participation helped tmux? Is there a large
developer community surrounding this? Are there any cool features
which are going to be making an appeareance soon?
Thanks for your patience and time!
David

[Christopher Ritsen]

Post by David Chanters
Hi,
Did this email make it to the list? Any takers on this?
David

I'll reply as an echo. I don't think there is a large community developer
around this project, mostly two people the last time I checked. Git history
is going to give you more insight on this question than anyone could. I'm
going to guess that new features are added as people come up with a need for
them.

[Dagobert Michelsen]

Hi David,

Post by Christopher Ritsen

Post by David Chanters
Did this email make it to the list? Any takers on this?

I'll reply as an echo. I don't think there is a large community developer
around this project, mostly two people the last time I checked. Git history
is going to give you more insight on this question than anyone could. I'm
going to guess that new features are added as people come up with a need for
them.

For a quick glimpse see the analysis at Ohloh:
https://www.openhub.net/p/tmux


Best regards

— Dago

[Thomas Adam]

Post by Dagobert Michelsen
Hi David,

Post by Christopher Ritsen

Post by David Chanters
Did this email make it to the list? Any takers on this?

I'll reply as an echo. I don't think there is a large community developer
around this project, mostly two people the last time I checked. Git history
is going to give you more insight on this question than anyone could. I'm
going to guess that new features are added as people come up with a need for
them.

https://www.openhub.net/p/tmux

No. That is misleading, and portrays my involvement much more than it
actually is. The committer information which those statistics are using
don't take into account the fact that the real contributor is part of the
commit message itself. See for example:

% git log | egrep -o '(from |by )[A-Z][A-Za-z0-9 ]*\.'|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr| head -n10
40 from Thomas Adam.
39 from George Nachman.
37 from Tiago Cunha.
19 from OpenBSD.
17 from Romain Francoise.
17 from J Raynor.
14 from Ben Boeckel.
12 from Chris Johnsen.
9 from Balazs Kezes.
8 from Micah Cowan.

-- Thomas Adam

[Christopher Ritsen]

Post by Thomas Adam

Post by Dagobert Michelsen
https://www.openhub.net/p/tmux

% git log | egrep -o '(from |by )[A-Z][A-Za-z0-9 ]*\.'|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr| head -n10
40 from Thomas Adam.
39 from George Nachman.
37 from Tiago Cunha.

The point I was trying to make was that it's not necessarily the
committer who is doing the work (they might be just applying a patch received
from elsewhere), but it would be expected that they would be attributed as the
author in the commit message.

[Ben Boeckel]

Post by Christopher Ritsen
The point I was trying to make was that it's not necessarily the
committer who is doing the work (they might be just applying a patch received
from elsewhere), but it would be expected that they would be attributed as the
author in the commit message.

Tmux also lives in OpenBSD's CVS repository which doesn't track
authorship. Is the SF repo committed to directly or do all patches still
flow through CVS?

Also, nice to see that I'm up there in contributions :) (though I think
some of mine are also attributed to my handle 'mathstuf' as well, but
those are likely to be bug reports over IRC or something).

--Ben

[Thomas Adam]

Post by Ben Boeckel

Post by Christopher Ritsen
The point I was trying to make was that it's not necessarily the
committer who is doing the work (they might be just applying a patch received
from elsewhere), but it would be expected that they would be attributed as the
author in the commit message.

Tmux also lives in OpenBSD's CVS repository which doesn't track
authorship. Is the SF repo committed to directly or do all patches still
flow through CVS?

Only portable fixes which aren't needed by OpenBSD are committed directly.
This is documented in the SYNCING file in the tmux git repo.

-- Thomas Adam

[David Chanters]

Post by Thomas Adam
% git log | egrep -o '(from |by )[A-Z][A-Za-z0-9 ]*\.'|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr| head -n10
40 from Thomas Adam.
39 from George Nachman.
37 from Tiago Cunha.
19 from OpenBSD.
17 from Romain Francoise.
17 from J Raynor.
14 from Ben Boeckel.
12 from Chris Johnsen.
9 from Balazs Kezes.
8 from Micah Cowan.

i think this should go on the tmux web site some how. is this
possible? it would be nice to see some of those names.

who updates this and how is it done?

David

[Thomas Adam]

Post by David Chanters

Post by Thomas Adam
% git log | egrep -o '(from |by )[A-Z][A-Za-z0-9 ]*\.'|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr| head -n10
40 from Thomas Adam.
39 from George Nachman.
37 from Tiago Cunha.
19 from OpenBSD.
17 from Romain Francoise.
17 from J Raynor.
14 from Ben Boeckel.
12 from Chris Johnsen.
9 from Balazs Kezes.
8 from Micah Cowan.

i think this should go on the tmux web site some how. is this
possible? it would be nice to see some of those names.
who updates this and how is it done?

Both Nicholas and I have the ability to update the web site.

However, how strongly do people feel about needing this information, either
on the web site or some file in Git? It would be a slight nuisance to
maintain, although it could just about be scripted, minus a few obvious
exclusions.

-- Thomas Adam

[Nicholas Marriott]

All the commit history is in git, we don't need a list somewhere else.

Post by Thomas Adam

Post by David Chanters

Post by Thomas Adam
% git log | egrep -o '(from |by )[A-Z][A-Za-z0-9 ]*\.'|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr| head -n10
40 from Thomas Adam.
39 from George Nachman.
37 from Tiago Cunha.
19 from OpenBSD.
17 from Romain Francoise.
17 from J Raynor.
14 from Ben Boeckel.
12 from Chris Johnsen.
9 from Balazs Kezes.
8 from Micah Cowan.

i think this should go on the tmux web site some how. is this
possible? it would be nice to see some of those names.
who updates this and how is it done?

Both Nicholas and I have the ability to update the web site.
However, how strongly do people feel about needing this information, either
on the web site or some file in Git? It would be a slight nuisance to
maintain, although it could just about be scripted, minus a few obvious
exclusions.
-- Thomas Adam
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[David Chanters]

Hi,

but a lot of other projects do and i think that's important. why is
this one different?

if you won't have such a list, would you consider adding something to
the web page telling users how they can find out how the contributors
are? something like the git command mentioned earlier in this email
thread?

David

On 11 March 2015 at 12:41, Nicholas Marriott

Post by Nicholas Marriott
All the commit history is in git, we don't need a list somewhere else.

Post by Thomas Adam

Post by David Chanters

Post by Thomas Adam
% git log | egrep -o '(from |by )[A-Z][A-Za-z0-9 ]*\.'|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr| head -n10
40 from Thomas Adam.
39 from George Nachman.
37 from Tiago Cunha.
19 from OpenBSD.
17 from Romain Francoise.
17 from J Raynor.
14 from Ben Boeckel.
12 from Chris Johnsen.
9 from Balazs Kezes.
8 from Micah Cowan.

i think this should go on the tmux web site some how. is this
possible? it would be nice to see some of those names.
who updates this and how is it done?

Both Nicholas and I have the ability to update the web site.
However, how strongly do people feel about needing this information, either
on the web site or some file in Git? It would be a slight nuisance to
maintain, although it could just about be scripted, minus a few obvious
exclusions.
-- Thomas Adam
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored
by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all
things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to
news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the
conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/
_______________________________________________
tmux-users mailing list
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tmux-users