Paring down
Most of my development efforts end by 'fading away': makepup, and tons of other gtkdialog-based apps/utilities I worked on or experimented with - waste of time really. A few hang around for seemingly ever (Precord still occasionally gets mentioned by someone or other) but on the whole most have ceased to exist or are no longer used even by myself. And sometimes I ask myself: what was the point of all that work? I should just use something someone else makes and sit back, relax, and occasionally ask for improvements (the old forum Pelo approach...). Actually, I think Pelo was wise in that regard - ManjaroXFCE is not far from what I want in practice anyway (except I'd remove some of the heavy gloss XFCE brings - but that would be a pretty easy knife job too). But I do want frugal install, so WDL initrd provides that for me should I decide to abandon everything other than that and let Manjaro take care of everything else 
One particularly big/huge past effort I undertook was a fork I made of gtkdialog itself in order to allow some of the gtkdialog-based apps I had made or others I used to work correctly without modification even if the underlying system shell was not bash. Actually gtkwialog is a bit more than that - it contains an alternative way of receiving input and creating output than via C system() function calls. Nevertheless, I find now that all the distro's I use (including flavours of WeeDogLinux) use bash as their system shell so traditional gtkdialog works for all such apps I still use, and gtkwialog is no longer needed by me either.
To free my brain/time from ever feeling I need to develop gtkwialog further, therefore, I duly announce that I henceforth am abandoning the fork. Actually, there is another reason for that... I plan in due time to abandon all use of gtkdialog-requiring apps and utilities altogether, including my own. Over time I came to 'hate' gtkdialog as a programming mechanism anyway - time moves on and gtkdialog does not deserve to keep such space more generally. In the repositories of most distros, gtkdialog is in fact no longer available, and frankly I think it is better to move on and develop any such utility apps in better supported ways.
The original gtkdialog code base was pretty neat and small (one source script as far as I recall) but then it was developed big-time via old Puppy forum support threads and ended up including all sorts of wonderful (but somehow messy and awful) bells and whistles.. but really I preferred the old simple one for easy reliable maintenance for what should have been simple apps. Certainly there is nothing quite as capable of producing relatively complex GUI frontends for bash and awk scripts out there, but I realize now I'd rather use something like Python with Kivy (or even PySimpleGUI) for both the simple and the more complex. I have dabbled with straight C plus GTK+2 (a fork I once made of old xhippo), but that is far too complex a mess of an approach for the simple utilities I use anyway - a simplified abstraction is much more appropriate in my opinion and even yad is a lot tidier than old gtkdialog. Goodbye gtkdialog I thus say... no tears from me... Yes, I like wex (and sometimes even still use Precord) but I can recode these... eventually once I have time.
Yes, I know, there are so many pretty nice old gtkdialog-based apps out there... shame, but there are always alternatives. Certainly painful to ever see new programs still being written with it - I can't help but feel such old old ancient approaches holds back the younger developers around here - they put themselves in a kind of time-wasting time-warp of a trap. Avoid it!
