Squeak newsgroup ?

Les Tyrrell tyrrell at canis.uiuc.edu
Thu Mar 18 20:33:52 UTC 1999


Regarding digest-like solutions...

I've been thinking about a solution where there could be a web-accessible
repository
of the Squeak list, but rather than a simple time-sliced digest one could
subscribe to recieve
an update message describing which aspects of the Squeak system had been
discussed
during some time period.  Basically, the idea is that posts are recieved by
some repository
out there listening in on the conversations, and then using keywords to
assign messages
to various ( usually multiple ) categories, such as "modules", "parser",
"syntax", whatever.

The message recieved by digest recipients could give a quick summary,
indicating what
new things had come up but not actually sending them to the subscribers.

Or, since a good categorization scheme would be hard to get right, perhaps
the digest
message could just be a series of subject headers ( I suspect that this
would give a lot
of value for little effort ) linked back into the messages in the
repository.

Of course, if people *like* all the messages, but simply don't like the many
interuptions
of lots of small messages, then a single digest message in either plain text
or html
format ( I like the idea of html so that it can have a quick summary and
table of contents
with links to each message ) would be fine without requiring much effort.

The reason I bring this up is that sometime in the near future I would like
to do a project that
I think of as "The Visible Squeak".  The idea is to try and build a decent
information repository
that would make it easy for interested parties to find out more about some
aspect of the
Squeak system than we can currently get just by reading the source code.  In
essence,
the idea is to break this information resource up along modular lines ( that
is, try to identify
reasonable subsets of the Squeak system, and then start associating whatever
information
we can find with those subsets- so for instance, in addition to any formal
literature one
could find on things like Self or prototypes or meta-object protocols, one
could also
easily find the e-mail messages that have been written by people asking and
answering
questions about those things, as well as the source code history of the
relevant systems.
I'd also like this system to make it easier for people of similar interests
to more readily
collaborate on the evolution of Squeak's various components.  I suspect that
this
would be a lot of work...

At any rate, I can certainly sympathize with the folks getting flooded with
the Squeak
list- I like this list a lot, but keep getting distracted by it.  It's
actually rather peaceful
to switch Squeak into full-screen mode so that I can't tell that my e-mail
client has
just gotten another message.

les





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list