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
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|