[lojban-beginners] Re: vlatai and logflash

["Colin Wright" <colin.wright@denbridgemarine.com>]

I'm not in a convenient place to create long, clear, expository emails.
This will not be as complete as I would like.  However, you seem to be
confused about something for which I might be able to help.

You said:

> The reference to jbofihe (which includes valatai) is on:
> http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Dictionaries%2C+Glossers+and+parsers
> 'jbofihe' is linked to an address which allows you to download
> jbofihe-snap_20030418.tar.tar which supposedly includes vlatai.
> How do I unpack it to get at vlatai? Certainly, WinZip doesn't
> do it.

The only reference I can find takes me to http://www.rc0.org.uk/jbofihe/

There we can find a table, the first entry gives this information:

| Version : snap_20030418
| Released : 18 April 2003
| Status : Current trial release
| Source code distribution : Available by HTTP (link)
| MSDOS binary distribution : None

The link you probably refer to is this one:

http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/jbofihe/jbofihe-snap_20030418.tar.gz

Note: This is a source code distribution, not an executable.  It does
not, as you say, link to jbofihe-snap_20030418.tar.tar  It might be that
Windows helpfully renames it into that.  However, it is a compressed
tar file, easily uncompressed and extracted on every system I use, and
created using systems that have readily available, free distribution.
It does not contain a program you can run.  It has source code that you
will need to compile.

Probably WinZip isn't one of the packages that can extract it, and you
probably don't have a compiler unless you're into programming.

It may be that Windows has already decompressed it.  I wouldn't know.
Windows does try to be helpful, and I can never work out what it's done.

> References to both of these appear on the Wiki on the
> pages most likely to be used by beginners.  This is not
> where we want to discourage them from going further!

You have absolutely no argument from me here, but these are packages
produced by people with more enthusiasm than time.  Clear, complete
and professional packages take time.  A lot of time.  I certainly
don't have time to work on the literally hundreds of things that
I think could be better.

Further, most of these packages are produced by people using Linux and
without access to development tools on Windows.  After all, Linux comes
for free with compilers or interpreters for C, C++, Python, AWK, Perl and
more, and there are freely downloadable packages for languages such as
Pascal, Ruby, OCaml, Haskell, Common Lisp, Scheme, and many more.

Windows comes with Solitaire.

Making Windows packages is non-trivial.

I use jbofi'e all the time.  Downloading, unpacking, compiling and running
was a trivial exercise.  I've never worked with LogFlash - I had much the
same problem as you, and I simply gave up.

I know that might not help much, but it seems clear that the lojban wiki
is made by geeks, and generally is not suitable for non-geeky beginners.
If you would like to build a site more suited to the non-geeky beginner
then I'm sure people would be happy to provide materials and assistance.

Rgds,

Colin


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