Un peu de nouvelles qui datent du mois de juillet sur le site de Drastic, Lordus semble avoir des problèmes d'ordre personnel (j'espère que tout va bien pour lui), et à Exophase n'a pas eu de nouvelle depuis un bon moment, d'où le peu de nouvelle concernant l'émulateur Drastic.
Voici ce que dit Exophase:
The state of DraStic and its future
Quote
Postby Exophase » Sun Jun 18, 2017 3:33 am
"Hi everyone,
As many of you are aware, there's been a lot of uncertainty in what the current state of DraStic is (especially on Android) and what can be done. I think enough is clear on my side now that I can talk in more detail about where things currently stand.
The situation with Lordus
First some background, for those who aren't aware. I originally developed DraStic on my Linux desktop, then released it for the Linux-based Open Pandora handheld in Feburary 2013. I had long term plans to eventually release it for sale on Android, but I didn't have any experience with developing for Android. For that reason I asked my long time friend Lordus if he wanted to help with this, and he agreed. I feel like Lordus went well beyond my expectations in providing features and updates for DraStic's Android build.
I'm sad to say that I haven't heard from Lordus in a while. He became unresponsive starting around early October of last year. I did hear from him for two days in the middle of January. He expressed that he was having some personal issues, but I can't say much more than that, and while that gave some assurance that something severe and unrecoverable didn't happen to him I haven't heard from him since. All avenues of contact such as e-mail and phone numbers have been unfruitful. He lives in a different country from me, and while I have an address I don't know if he still lives there and I don't think it'd be a good idea to try to contact him this way. Honestly I'm just really worried about him and I hope he can still be reached some day, and that nothing truly awful has happened to him. If he feels burdened about contacting me because of his role with DraStic then I do hope that he reads this post one day and that it helps relieve him of that burden.
While I've maintained a repository for DraStic and ultimately had authorship/approval on Google Play, Lordus basically handled building and updating the Android versions from end to end. Lordus included all of the source code, assets, scripts, and directions for building on Android so I could take over in case he wasn't available. Unfortunately, there were pieces of the repository that were not kept up to date, so after a certain point I could no longer build new versions. As Lordus was committing things to other parts of the repository I wasn't aware that it was incomplete until it was too late. So, that means that there are some changes that have been made to the emulator that were lost and have to be reimplemented.
What this means is that source code to some parts of the updates made from around version 2.4.0.1 and onwards were lost. Raw assets were also lost, but these could be trivially recovered from the APK.
Ultimately this indicates some major mistakes on my part. I should have insisted on being able to build every official release identically before publishing them, and I should have maintained more avenues of contact and contingencies in place in the event that Lordus was no longer available. I can only apologize for these serious oversights.
What will happen in the near term
Fortunately, there is some good news. Recently I've been approached by xperia64, who told me that if Lordus's changes were in the APK's DEX classes (code that's been compiled from Java to Dalvik bytecode) he would be able to recover them. Initially I thought that Lordus's work was primarily in the app's NDK library (native compiled C code), but actually it looks like almost everything pertinent was in the Java code.
xperia64 has worked by manually decompiling Smali to reproduce Lordus's Java changes, and I've reviewed Lordus's NDK code to see where changes should be applicable. We've got things building and right now it looks like we have a build that at first glance appears to be about to the level of 2.5.0.3a again.
I intend to release this APK as an alpha in the next week or two, and hopefully it will undergo extensive testing to find any possible regressions or any other things that we've missed. When we feel that it's good enough we'll move it to beta, and after enough time we should be able to release more full updates again.
Longer term outlook
I'd like to get to a point where at the very least bug fixes, minor feature additions and optimizations can be resumed in the Android version.
There's also a very real possibility that the app will become open source in the future. For anyone interested in buying it (who hasn't yet) it may be worth waiting for this instead, since that would almost certainly mean it could be obtained for free later. But this isn't something I can really guarantee just yet. I will say that even if this happens the work done to get a complete building and stable/non-regressing source repository is an absolutely essential prerequisite.
I also intend to work on getting the Raspberry Pi version in a better state, and then I can most likely release more or less equivalent builds for Linux and Windows PCs (just x86 desktop, not Windows Phone)
I think that's everything. Please let me know if anyone has any questions, I will be happy to answer them in this thread."
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17.03.17 22:43
