Time to make a Freshmeat kind of Squeak site ?

Stefan Matthias Aust sma at 3plus4.de
Tue May 2 18:19:24 UTC 2000


At 18:19 02.05.00 +0200, Karl Ramberg wrote:
>I've been following the recent discussions here on the list and
>there seem to be several parallel projects and unknown projects

Funny, a few months ago I posted a similar message to this list 
:-)  Obviously, it's still difficult to get a complete overview.

>they never get out because
>1 Nobody knows they exist
>2 Nobody knows where to look
>3 Nobody knows how to use them

I think, the main problem is #1.  Once you learn a few web addresses, #2 
isn't that critical.  www.squeak.org is still a good point to start.  The 
swiki (http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak.1) should be the central point 
for any kind of information.  You might also want to use a web search 
engine (www.google.com for example) or check out www.sourceforge.net 
(currently 7 Smalltalk projects).  Then, some people post their private web 
page addresses to this list, look there too. And #3, well, let's 
concentrate on #1 :-)

Basically I proposed a central repository where people can announce their 
stuff and other people can browse around.  Depending on the number of 
submissions, categories and a search facility might be useful.  Freshmeat 
offers all of this and more.  You can for example add comments.  Authors 
can log in and keep their stuff up-to-date (I think).  And last but perhaps 
most important, Freshmeat has a pleasant look.  Hell, not only the 
www.squeak.org has this ill-looking green, also the swiki chose that ugly 
mold-green color.

The swiki might be a platform we could use right now to post code and 
projects.  I'm not the biggest fan of swikis as they're to unordered 
(chaotic in its negative sense) and it's difficult to track changes.  But I 
think, it can be done.  All we need is a simple template like

* name
* categories
* short description
* url to download code
* url to project (if applicable)
* url to screen shoots (if applicable)

and enough discipline to use that page in a consistent manner.  We could 
add comments without problems and everybody could update the 
pages.  Searching the information however is difficult and indices would 
have to be created manually.  A nice look? Well, probably not without 
changes to the swiki itself.

For other solutions, we'd need somebody to volunteer.  Whether that person 
then uses a tool or simply and HTML editor isn't important.  The only 
important think is that people really want to use that service.

A few comments on #3.  It's up to the author to provide a simple way to 
help other people to use his/her code.   A little common knowledge might be 
assumable.  .st files or .cs files should be filed-in.  I'd always save my 
image or use a new one and use the "browse code" feature of the file list 
to check for conflicts.  From the first line in the source, you can guess 
the squeak version the author used.  Later versions may or may not 
work.  Once you got the classes, check the some usage examples on the class 
side of some importantly-named classes.  Or check the preable of the change 
set.

But I'd agree that we need some better conventions here.


bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust  //  Bevor wir fallen, fallen wir lieber auf





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