From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

On 8/29/2025 9:09 AM, Anton Ertl wrote:

But once we release gforth-1.0 and Debian would work with that and ...

Is there a roadmap for the gforth-1.0 release?
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

Buzz McCool <buzz_mccool@yahoo.com> writes:

On 8/29/2025 9:09 AM, Anton Ertl wrote:

But once we release gforth-1.0 and Debian would work with that and ...

Is there a roadmap for the gforth-1.0 release?

It will be released it's done. It's feature-complete, but the
documentation is not yet complete.

If you don't care about the documentation, you can use a recent
snapshot, and use a system that is very similar to what I expect
Gforth-1.0 to be.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
New standard: https://forth-standard.org/
EuroForth 2025 CFP: http://www.euroforth.org/ef25/cfp.html
EuroForth 2025 registration: https://euro.theforth.net/
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

On 8/30/25 06:54, Anton Ertl wrote:

Buzz McCool <buzz_mccool@yahoo.com> writes:

Is there a roadmap for the gforth-1.0 release?

It will be released it's done. It's feature-complete, but the
documentation is not yet complete.

I'm looking forward to the complete release. Thank you for the update.

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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

In article <108v98r$2nlb3$1@dont-email.me>,
Buzz McCool <buzz_mccool@yahoo.com> wrote:

On 8/30/25 06:54, Anton Ertl wrote:

Buzz McCool <buzz_mccool@yahoo.com> writes:

Is there a roadmap for the gforth-1.0 release?

It will be released it's done. It's feature-complete, but the
documentation is not yet complete.

I'm looking forward to the complete release. Thank you for the update.

I hope that put pressure on the Debian staff. It is a shame that
there is no official modern gforth in the distribution.

There is no substitute for

sudo apt install gforth

in order to make people try forth.

Groetjes Albert
--
The Chinese government is satisfied with its military superiority over USA.
The next 5 year plan has as primary goal to advance life expectancy
over 80 years, like Western Europe.
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

On 8/30/25 06:54, Anton Ertl wrote:

It will be released it's done. It's feature-complete, but the
documentation is not yet complete.

On 8/31/2025 5:25 AM, albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl wrote:
I hope that put pressure on the Debian staff. It is a shame that
there is no official modern gforth in the distribution.

There is no substitute for

sudo apt install gforth

in order to make people try forth.

Anton, do any of your undergraduates need a senior project that could help out with a Debian release?





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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

Buzz McCool <buzz_mccool@yahoo.com> writes:

Anton, do any of your undergraduates need a senior project that could help out with a Debian release?

There is a release as a .deb package. And you can install it with
apt, once you have added net2o.de to your apt sources (see the section
about "Debian >= Bullseye" on https://gforth.org/). As for having it
as an official Debian package, one would have to become a Debian
developer in order to do that, and, from what I read, that's a rather
long process.

But if someone volunteers, they can start with Bernd's .deb and then
maim it according to the requirements of Debian (the current official
Debian Gforth package does not include the manual and disables
native-code generation (for the current development gforth-fast that
causes a slowdown by a factor 4-11). So I am not so sure that having
no official Debian gforth package is a real loss.

Concerning the idea that undergraduate students help out, I would need
some that are interested in whatever I want help for, and my
experience is that most of the time, advising the student consumes a
lot of time, and the results are disappointing (not necessarily the
student's fault); however, sometimes the results are great. In any
case, unpaid student work is good for proof-of-concepts, not for
something that needs long-term involvement like an official Debian
package.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
New standard: https://forth-standard.org/
EuroForth 2025 CFP: http://www.euroforth.org/ef25/cfp.html
EuroForth 2025 registration: https://euro.theforth.net/
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

Thanks for your kind response Anton!
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

In article <2025Oct24.171132@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:

Buzz McCool <buzz_mccool@yahoo.com> writes:

Anton, do any of your undergraduates need a senior project that could

help out with a Debian release?

There is a release as a .deb package. And you can install it with
apt, once you have added net2o.de to your apt sources (see the section
about "Debian >= Bullseye" on https://gforth.org/). As for having it

So if you are into gforth, you can install it. Big deal.
The real goal should be that if you are in a graphic Debian package
manager, gforth should show up, if you search for forth.

as an official Debian package, one would have to become a Debian
developer in order to do that, and, from what I read, that's a rather
long process.

I have tried to get ciforth in the Debian distribution. You don't
have to become a developer, "merely" you have to find a developer
that sponsors the package. The mere fact that gforth was in Debian,
means that gforth has a sponsor.
I had a sponsor for ciforth, but
- he had no affinity to Forth
- he didn't understand the quasi FIG-forth philosophy behind ciforth
(enable everyone to build a Forth from 1 "one" assembler file).
- he concentrated on the insane rules to automatically build new
package, cause me to waste enormous time to work that on github
- I could not respect him as a software builder. He had one project
on github. There was no specification/comment about functions,
files. There was not even a readme, where you could guess what
that package was for, supposedly.

You could generate the assembler file in different assembler formats.
For Debian this meant that the mechanism to do this, was part of the
source, negating the genius of FIG-forth that you need minimal
understanding to modify. In fact this was far superior to mere "open source". That is to say, my experience was on the whole negative.

But if someone volunteers, they can start with Bernd's .deb and then
maim it according to the requirements of Debian (the current official
Debian Gforth package does not include the manual and disables
native-code generation (for the current development gforth-fast that
causes a slowdown by a factor 4-11). So I am not so sure that having
no official Debian gforth package is a real loss.

You are short sighted. It is not about having the latest and greatest
gforth in the Debian distribution. It is about having gforth available
to the Debian world. Preferably a modern one.
A compiler is a tool. Modifications should be made cautiously with
an eye on upward compatibility.
Hell, if you could convince a Debian developer to sponsor the package
that is a real win. At the least gforth 0.7.3 remains available.

Now the sponsor of gforth has left the package orphaned. That means
without action, gforth will disappear altogether from the Debian distribution.

Concerning the idea that undergraduate students help out, I would need
some that are interested in whatever I want help for, and my
experience is that most of the time, advising the student consumes a
lot of time, and the results are disappointing (not necessarily the
student's fault); however, sometimes the results are great. In any
case, unpaid student work is good for proof-of-concepts, not for
something that needs long-term involvement like an official Debian
package.

Let us assume there is a modern gforth in Debian. The priority is that compilations work from a Debian release to the next. If there are no
changes that is not much work.
It is much work if you treat gforth as an academic exercise to
introduce new concepts. Even then, a student could introduce a
certain aspect (say recognizers) from a version to the next.

Exposure to the unwashed Debian users, will generate (a lot of) bug^H^H^Hdefects reports. There is no reason that sometimes a student
could take up one deficiency to lift, and get study points for it.

- anton

--
The Chinese government is satisfied with its military superiority over USA.
The next 5 year plan has as primary goal to advance life expectancy
over 80 years, like Western Europe.
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl writes:

The real goal should be that if you are in a graphic Debian package
manager, gforth should show up, if you search for forth.

And then what? Get a slow Gforth package without documentation? Sure
makes a good first impression.

BTW, I am not into Rust, and we have used Debian on our machines for
decades. So when I recently had to install Rust on one of our
machines, I first thought that I would do it the Debian way, so we
first upgraded the machine to Debian 13, to also get a recent Rust. Then
it was not so obvious how to proceed, so I went to rust-lang.org,
clicked on "Install" (so I was at
<https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/>); this first wanted to sell
rustup to me, but that's for installing it into a single account,
whereas I wanted to install it such that our students could use it
(and we would not have a 100 Rust installations clogging our SSD), so
I followed "Learn more" to https://forge.rust-lang.org/infra/other-installation-methods.html, and
finally went for the Standalone installers, downloaded the stable
tar.xz for the platform, and installed it, which was pretty painless.

There is some Rust stuff in Debian, but obviously it was not the way
to get me to install Rust, despite first installing Debian (the
eventual way would probably also have worked with Debian 11).

Even then, a student could introduce a
certain aspect (say recognizers) from a version to the next.

Recognizers are a bad example. Once you have the concepts worked out, recognizers are easy to implement. So either the student would have
to work out the concepts (and in that case come up with the project themselves), like Matthias Trute has done (and my students have not),
or a student cannot help here.

Exposure to the unwashed Debian users, will generate (a lot of) >bug^H^H^Hdefects reports.

Not in my experience. I actually receive the bug reports that Debian
gets for Gforth. They are few, and most of those are specific to the
Debian package. We get many more bug reports on the Gforth mailing
list, and also more on gforth's bug tracker.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
New standard: https://forth-standard.org/
EuroForth 2025 CFP: http://www.euroforth.org/ef25/cfp.html
EuroForth 2025 registration: https://euro.theforth.net/
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

In article <2025Oct25.181001@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:

albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl writes:

The real goal should be that if you are in a graphic Debian package >>manager, gforth should show up, if you search for forth.

And then what? Get a slow Gforth package without documentation? Sure
makes a good first impression.

That is a cardinal sin, a package without documentation. Why have modern Gforth's no documentation?
Gforth 0.7.3 has a reasonable info documentation in Debian.
After unzipping this is 723Kbyte for 1864 words.
All in all this is a usable Forth.
(lina has 500 Kbyte for 351 words. )

<SNIP>

Not in my experience. I actually receive the bug reports that Debian
gets for Gforth. They are few, and most of those are specific to the
Debian package. We get many more bug reports on the Gforth mailing
list, and also more on gforth's bug tracker.

That means that gforth 0.7.3 is a mature product. It is also
reasonably documented.
It is time to stamp it release 1.0.0 . I hear that you don't see an
opportunity to improve upon that.
Algol 60 was a distinct improvement over all its successors.
No shame info that.

- anton

--
The Chinese government is satisfied with its military superiority over USA.
The next 5 year plan has as primary goal to advance life expectancy
over 80 years, like Western Europe.
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl writes:

In article <2025Oct25.181001@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote: >>albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl writes:

The real goal should be that if you are in a graphic Debian package >>>manager, gforth should show up, if you search for forth.

And then what? Get a slow Gforth package without documentation? Sure >>makes a good first impression.

That is a cardinal sin, a package without documentation. Why have modern >Gforth's no documentation?

What makes you think that it has no documentation?

Debian does not deliver the documentation because they consider the
GFDL to be a non-free license. For other GNU software, they have a
doc package that they deliver as non-free package. For Gforth, they
just do not distribute the documentation at all.

Gforth 0.7.3 has a reasonable info documentation in Debian.

When I say

info Gforth

on a Debian 11 where the Debian gforth packages are installed, it
displays the man page. There are no gforth.info* files in
/usr/share/info (which is managed by the package manager).

If you see more than the man page, maybe you have installed Gforth
from source on the system at a point (then the default location would
be /usr/local/share/info).

Alternatively, if you tend to upgrade Debian in-place, you might have
the documentation from the time before they decided to remove it.

Not in my experience. I actually receive the bug reports that Debian
gets for Gforth. They are few, and most of those are specific to the >>Debian package. We get many more bug reports on the Gforth mailing
list, and also more on gforth's bug tracker.

That means that gforth 0.7.3 is a mature product.

We also receive more for 0.7.3 on our mailing list than through
Debian.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
New standard: https://forth-standard.org/
EuroForth 2025 CFP: http://www.euroforth.org/ef25/cfp.html
EuroForth 2025 registration: https://euro.theforth.net/
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

In article <2025Oct26.091838@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:

albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl writes:

In article <2025Oct25.181001@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote: >>>albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl writes:

The real goal should be that if you are in a graphic Debian package >>>>manager, gforth should show up, if you search for forth.

And then what? Get a slow Gforth package without documentation? Sure >>>makes a good first impression.

That is a cardinal sin, a package without documentation. Why have modern >>Gforth's no documentation?

What makes you think that it has no documentation?

Debian does not deliver the documentation because they consider the
GFDL to be a non-free license. For other GNU software, they have a
doc package that they deliver as non-free package. For Gforth, they
just do not distribute the documentation at all.

Gforth 0.7.3 has a reasonable info documentation in Debian.

When I say

info Gforth

on a Debian 11 where the Debian gforth packages are installed, it
displays the man page. There are no gforth.info* files in
/usr/share/info (which is managed by the package manager).

Okay I was wrong. I somehow got the gforth documentation belonging to
the package. That was a long time ago, 2009.

That is why they have a possibility to download packages from a
"non free" site which is accommodated albeit not in the pure
Debian distribution. That is where I have my info documentation
from gforth 0.7.3 from.
You can recommend packages while downloading gforth.
That can be a documentation package from a non-free site.

If you see more than the man page, maybe you have installed Gforth
from source on the system at a point (then the default location would
be /usr/local/share/info).

Maybe I did (2009 ...)
Debian is not against installing non-free packages.
I am with you disapproving of documentation with a nearly free
license is dubious, compare it with the non- acceptance of
an assembler file as source, merely because it is available
for other assembler formats.

Alternatively, if you tend to upgrade Debian in-place, you might have
the documentation from the time before they decided to remove it.

That is a problem. Fortunately gforth is never updated.
<SNIP>


Look at https://github.com/albertvanderhorst/lina
for an example that you can make an illegal deb package that
installs okay. Debian doesn't guarantee that it works together
with other packages.
The package is acceptable to Debian according to the rules.
In the releases there is a deb package that you
can install with apt, and all the documentation goes where it
belongs.

You could do the same. Make a documented gforth distribution
in a deb file complete with documentation.

- anton

Groetjes Albert
--
The Chinese government is satisfied with its military superiority over USA.
The next 5 year plan has as primary goal to advance life expectancy
over 80 years, like Western Europe.
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.forth

In article <nnd$3c28916b$51f27a7a@5bc800698882be78>,
<albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> wrote:

In article <2025Oct26.091838@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,

<SNIP>

If you see more than the man page, maybe you have installed Gforth
from source on the system at a point (then the default location would
be /usr/local/share/info).

Maybe I did (2009 ...)

In Debian I did (dd. 2025 oct 27)

apt-get source gforth

I could build with
configure
make gforth

and run gforth allright. (Also gforth-fast )

Making the docs fails because
doc/gforth.ds
is missing somehow.
There are tex files and instructions around.
With a slight fix maybe the info can be generated?

All in all I thing gforth 0.7.3 is worth preserving.

<SNIP>

- anton

Groetjes Albert
--
The Chinese government is satisfied with its military superiority over USA. >The next 5 year plan has as primary goal to advance life expectancy
over 80 years, like Western Europe.

--
The Chinese government is satisfied with its military superiority over USA.
The next 5 year plan has as primary goal to advance life expectancy
over 80 years, like Western Europe.
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