Of source code lost in eternity

Peter Crowther Peter.Crowther at IT-IQ.com
Mon Jan 10 17:25:53 UTC 2000


> From: Stefan Matthias Aust [mailto:sma at 3plus4.de]
> Sent: 09 January 2000 19:03
[...]
> (please note: chaotic != evil, for a good definition of
> chaos please see Moorcocks Elric books)

Or the Principia Discordia, which has a slightly different point that the
order/disorder axis is orthogonal to the creative/destructive axis; to be
truly creative requires a mixture of order and disorder.  Wikis in general
tend, to me, to embody the original idea of the World-Wide Web as a huge
interconected mesh (that's "mess" pronounced after three double whiskies) of
information where you find extra nuggets of gold on your way to your main
interest.  Put bluntly, I can no longer afford the time to do that; I need a
search engine!  Change notification would be good too.

> I think, the
> Perl community also has a central archive which might be 
> something worth copying.

CPAN.  Good as an archive, but not (directly) well indexed or with good
change notification.  I'm not overly fond of it.  However, I'm a perl
newbie, and I've no doubt a certain regular contributor to this list will
point out that there are perl scripts to search the archive :-).

This does raise a point: Any repository should probably be written in Squeak
if it can be, so that members of the Squeak community can maintain it.

> >The swiki would be more up to
> >date if we would all use it more often.
> 
> Yes, I'd subscribe that that last statement.  But instead of 
> believing in
> the people, I started to wonder whether the tool is right.

If no person uses a tool for a particular job, it may not be the fault of
the person.

> >The better a job we can do of making
> >unofficial contributions easy to find and use, the more tested and
> >refined these unofficial contributions will become.

Absolutely.  The key here is 'find'.  I'd like to propose two ideas:

1. Find some way of making the archive of fixes searchable by keyword.

2. Once this is done (or earlier, in the hope that it will be done!), ask
developers of new fixes to put a line of likely keywords in the preamble.
This may not even be necessary, as we may find that the existing keyword
search works well enough --- an advantage of distributing source code!

Thoughts?

	- Peter





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