On a serious note however, I would question the "If you want P96 to be maintained" statement. Actually, for me it works great as is - admittedly using the legacy OS it was designed for.
The idea is really to update "a little bit more than P96 alone". But the components have to work with each other, and that's sometimes a bit delicate.
To give you an idea what I'm talking about: When I worked on layers V45, which was approximately in ~2000 or so, I re-did the whole layer-re-arrangement code to be faster and more RTG-friendly. This works so far, but what I did not notice immediately (but only little later) is that the P96 overlay functions for the Pablo board (video overlay) depend on some internal undocumented layer pointers.
Bad, bad, evil P96! Ok, so I was working with Tobias and Alex anyhow, getting some core-level bugs of P96 fixed, and so I had the chance and fixed this P96 issue as well. Unfortunately, T&A lost interest in the whole P96 affair soon after (guess why!) and so the fixed and modified and V45-layers compliant version of P96 never really made it to the end user.
It's probably not the last issue in P96 that would, in the next (near) future require some minor update here and there. Probably to support some features of new hardware, or probably to support some new features of some Os level components.
Now, of course, folks like Kolla could come and say: "Thomas, just work more in your spare time, update layers, then update P96, then update graphics, and here are a couple of bugs in exec as well...". However, as much as I like playing for the system, I don't have all the time to do that, and at some point, one must come to the conclusion that all the enthusiasm of a hand full of people is not enough to get the job done, and it requires some external motivation. AROS is still not there after all the years - not saying that they are doing a bad job - it's just too small a group and too little motivation. Not their fault, not at all!
Probably it needs a motivation that will someone buy some lunch. Not necessarily *my* lunch, but someone's.
It's really more than P96 all over, and I'm really asking to respect that. I don't want to let AmigaOs classic rot more than it is, with everyone patching it together - plus making it incredibly hard to set it up correctly and get it running correctly.
That requires fixing, and it requires that someone has to pay for the lunch of somebody else at some point. It doesn't work "all for free" because we're all so nice people and funded by Norwegian Oil or the German state.
