Of source code lost in eternity: A suggestion (or a few)

Henrik Gedenryd Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se
Sun Jan 9 19:08:34 UTC 2000


Stefan,

You raise important points; it's the eternal issue of non-controlled
evolution vs. centralized development. If Squeak is the Internet, you are
suggesting something like a Yahoo for it; or a 'moderated' version of an
imagined 'Squeak fixes' newsgroup.
I think the latter kinds are important for raising the quality level, or, as
it were, the signal-to-noise ratio.  Especially since this is probably the
best kind of documentation we could ever reasonably get.

But keeping this distributed, low-overhead, volunteer-based and
disturbance-tolerant is key to success. As is starting small with room for
extension.

- What about some kind of automatic contribution submission and processing
format, that gets things registered on a published list (or set of lists
really). The contents and formats of contributions are often very similar,
and structuring such information on the creator's side has been found to be
very valuable (scientifically even), eg. by standardizing what info should
be provided and how (along Stefan's lines), since it makes searching and
retrieval much easier. Some kind of fill-in submission form thing, with
processing, using the built-in Squeak net facilities. The resulting list
could then be available and also distributed with Squeak releases.

The problem with Swikis is that everyone has to reinvent their own system
for announcing; on the other end there is no easy way of searching for what
you want, etc. There's simply too much reinventing the wheel, and you
shouldn't have to hack raw html--heck, you shouldn't ever have to do that.
WYSIWYG originated with Smalltalk after all :-)  (No Swiki criticism in
that.)

One could even extend this to allowing simple filing of topics from the
list; just taking a mail, adding an info-line or two for classification
(category:Morphic, etc.), and just forwarding it to an address that does the
processing into a 'live', not FAQ, but Asked Questions with Useful Answers
or something.

- A changeset 'digest', archived other than in e-mail. One thing I've
thought about before is an automatically compiled list of all changesets
(basically the text Dan posts with his announcements). This is just about
the most complete documentation we have for the system. Change set
documentation is lost on file-in, so new releases don't even tell what's new
in them as it is now. Such a digest seems simple to do and would be a
veritable goldmine.

- How about creating 'sub-hosts' (ie, 'moderators') for various parts of the
system? These guys would then be notified about a contribution to their
part, and could then, according to their level of ambition, compile the
information in a sub-digest, validate submissions, and estimate their
plausibility for being included in the general distribution. These
individuals would be volunteers who feel they know have sufficient
experience for doing this (but requiring no such thing as guru-hood). We
already have something similar to this for some parts on an entirely
implicit and informal level: Andreas for the Win VMs (among other things),
gatech for the Swiki etc., Andrew for the Plugin translation stuff, and so
on.

The completely free-for-all submission digests would correspond to the
entirely 'liberated' (ie. non-moderated) version of the distribution change
list 'digest'. As you realize, the information quality will be lower for
each successive step in this hierarchy.

- Also, it would be *really* useful to have a mailing list archive dating
back to the dawn of time, and that *works* (even if updated manually--the
newest stuff is already elsewhere). Unfortunately I don't have it all so I
can't do it ;) But I'd happily chip in a little for a large drive for
squeak.org if that's what it takes. I'll prefer to maintain a local copy of
it anyway.


I'm currently looking at a change-set-based submission processing thing (let
me know if you want me to proceed, and if you want to contribute). I've done
some information design previously so I have a basic idea of how to make it
useful.


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