Carey Gagnon said on Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:00:23 -0600

>Is this user list still active

What Ed said, but if you mean is the project still active...

I re-acquainted myself with http://dabodev.com/#background and to me it
looks like the major challenge is moving to Python 3.x this late in the
game. My Linux distribution, Void Linux, still packages Python2, but
look what it says about Python 2:

==============================================
[*] python2-2.7.18.11_2
Interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language (limited
install; not for regular use)
==============================================

To call the Python 2.x to Python 3.x a major upgrade is the
understatement of the century. In spite of a roughly 8 year warning
between initial deprecation and final non-support, a lot of projects
weren't able to fully make the switch. A lot of those projects were
one-man-bands like Dabo, where the main developer had to devote most of
his/her time to making a living with a day job.

The big, crowdfunded 100 developer projects had no trouble with the
switch, but of course I think we've all discovered, when a project has
100 developers it invariably enshittifies, losing what made it popular
in the first place.

Ed, I don't know how many Python files are in Dabo, or how big they
are, or how independent they are to facilitate per-file testing, or
whether you've already handled the low hanging fruit, namely,
converting the print command to the print() function. On things that
simple, if files are individually testable, I can give *some* help,
though not a lot.

My understanding from http://dabodev.com/#background is that Dabo has a
screen painter, and maybe even a database painter. If this is true, I
think its only competition in the Free Software world is Lazarus (Free
Software Delphi workalike), and take it from me, Lazarus has some
downsides. I did some basic (no pun intended) VB work in the mid to
late 1990's, and VB 3, back when deployment was easy, was a very nice,
easy way to make a GUI desktop data enabled program, so if Dabo is
anything like the old VB, or especially if it's anything like the old
Clarion 2, it's worth saving.

Harbour and XHarbour are some alternatives, and if you were good with
Clipper you might like them, and they can still use DBF files for quick
and dirty local-only stuff. I'm not ready to learn Harbour, especially
when it doesn't work as well on Linux as it does on Windows. I haven't
used Windows since March 2001.

Rust has some interesting addons that feature a Command Line Interface
(CLI) terminal that can do some graphics. For a very simple, almost
Hello World view of this sort of thing, you can git clone
https://gitlab.com/dagosplayground/code-play/scoreboard-rust .
Read README.md to see how dead bang easy it is to build: There's
only one dependency that isn't supplied by Rust's Cargo packager.
Clarion 2 for DOS was a CLI application with a screen painter, maybe
something similar can be done with Rust.

So like I said, I *might* be able to give some limited help making some
source run on Python 3.

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt 

http://444domains.com

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