The package comes as a zipped application, currently 115k. Current stable version is 2.24, 2000-09-18. Only minor new features have been added recently, and only one recent bug fix has changed any of the code which actually edits your GEDCOM.
Version 2.25 is currently considered beta release. I've used it for several years without it bombing out, except where it has been fed a GEDCOM which is broken. However, if you accidentally connect someone up as an ancestor of themselves, it can get very confused, and trying to fix it without saving the GEDCOM somewhere safe can result in it bombing out later.
The current development version 2.26 is labelled "Alpha", and is possibly not as stable as 2.25, since it is being periodically changed, so should probably not be relied upon.
The GEDCOM produced by 2.25 and 2.26 is not backward compatible with the slightly erroneous output of versions 2.20-2.24, care should be taken not to move over until it has become much more stable. However, snapshots of the code are on the site for those who would like to try the new user interfaces and features.
New features in 2.25 include:
The package comes as a zip, somewhat larger than the normal release, as there is a quantity of redundant code and quite a lot of debugging in there.
Version 2.26 includes
This lot should be here as another zip. This is substantially bigger than a normal release, as it contains two different versions of the !RunImage and multiple implementations of some library code, as well as a lot of debugging.
Version 0.13 has been out for a while. Version 0.14 has been in development ever since I got feedback from a real user out there in internet land. As I'm not going to be able to do any work on it for a short while, I've tidied it up for a release. Version 0.15 is my current development version, but there are so few changes from 0.14 as yet that I see no popint in rleeasing it. I'm no longer doing binary releases, as it really is too much to compile the stuff for several different versions of several different distributions. V 0.14 has been tested on Mandrake 9.0, 9.2 and 10.0 Linux, all using version 1.1.4 of FLTK. I'd be pleased to hear of your success or failure to build it on any other systems.
WARNING: you can put the binary anywhere you like (I just
run it where the build step leaves it, in /usr/local/src/xfamily/v014/XFamily
- there is no "make install" step as yet), but at the
moment, the GEDCOM file which the program reads is compiled in at
/usr/local/src/xfamily/test/test2.ged for versions after v0.13
which is not terribly helpful. Similarly, the messages files are looked for
at
/usr/local/src/xfamily/v014/messages/<name>
If you ask the program to write out its GEDCOM it will go to
/var/test.ged
Of course, you can use symbolic links to point these at any real file you
like. Warning the software is still at the
alpha stage (and may therefore crash unexpectedly) but now has some of the
functionality to change your GEDCOM file rather than being purely a browser.
You can save changed NOTEs back to the GEDCOM, so please take care if you
symlink the write location to the same place as the read location.
Currently, emphasis is on writing the functionality to deal with GEDCOM and display multiple views of a family tree. It may be some time (and certainly not until a full editing capability has been added) until the file-chooser functionality is written. I dislike the Linux file-loading idioms (although the file-chooser in FLTK 1.1.4 is nicer), as compared to the RISC OS "drag the file to the directory of choice" one, so I'd hope to provide a choice of both idioms if possible. This may depend on learning the protocols for ROX filer...
The source distribution is zipped (currently 95k). It doesn't have anything like proper version numbers yet, and comes with no guarantees, other than that it won't corrupt your GEDCOM yet, as long as you don't put a symlink to make it overwrite its input. (This guarantee will be removed in future versions :-). As of 0.14, the build tools for the International messages have been rewritten in Python, instead of needing you to have an Acorn RISC OS system on your desk. This was only relevant to anyone who wanted to change code enough to need to add new messages, or for translators to new languages. You will need the FLTK package, which has its own home page and also comes bundled with some distributions (eg. SuSE). There is a line in X!Family's makefile which you may need to modify to tell it where to find FLTK if you install it somewhere other than the default or have a different version than the one I have (1.1.4). I think the code will no longer work with FLTK 1.0.x versions, but 1.1.<anything> should be fine.
You might also need to change paths to some C/C++ header files (at least one lot seemed to move when I upgraded Mandrake versions). If anyone changes things to use a ./configure script, I'd be really pleased to receive your changes :-)
If anyone compiles this under a system other than Linux, or with a compiler other than gcc, I'd love to hear from you about any changes you had to make to get it to work, or what problems you have that are stopping it from compiling. I presonally have no interest in seeing a Windows version, but if you want to build one and have to make changes, I'll incorporate them into the distributed sources. If anyone would like to port FLTK to RISC OS, I'd be overjoyed to hear from you too ! Unfortunately, I think the port would need an X server, and the only one I know of for RISC OS is a ludicrously expensive commercial offering (though I have heard that there are a couple of free ones of unknown quality and availability).
The user manual for xfamily lags slightly behind the actual code, and is now on the site as an archive xfamdocs-014.zip. You can browse individual pages on this site, but these pages may lag slightly further behind and it is recommended that if you decide to download and build the software, you get the manual as a zip and unpack it into /usr/local/src/xfamily/html014. From there you can also browse it from the "Help" menu item within the program.