[Gambas-user] GAMBAS Suggestions

[Rob]

On Sunday 07 December 2008 14:27, nkoch22 at ...626... wrote:
> I find it curious that such a great piece of software doesn't have a
> better updated website and a bug/tracking system.

Gambas is a project with a benevolent dictator, namely Benoit, who does 
most of the work and prefers mailing lists for bug reporting.  You can 
sign up for notification of the subversion commits to see which bugs get 
fixed, as well.

I just looked at the project website (gambas.sf.net) and it correctly 
indicates that the current stable version is 2.9.0.  It provides a 
download link to that and instructions for checking out the development 
snapshots.  What do you see there that could be better updated?

There are forums out there, but what the community lacks is people who 
actually care about web forums.  I try to stay on top of linuxbasic.net 
which gets 5 or 10 posts per week, but when you get right down to it, 
mailing lists come to me whereas I have to go to a web forum.  
Gambasforum.tk gets a few posts a week as well.  Some other guy was trying 
a couple months ago to start a catch-all BASIC forum site, sort of a 
linuxbasic.net knockoff only with lots of added Windows users, but none of 
us had time to visit yet another forum.

The Gambasrad.org forums, once you set aside the mirrored content of this 
mailing list, are pretty quiet so I haven't been there in some time.  I 
just went there now and see that it calls itself the "Gambas home page", 
but that doesn't seem to be the case.  If you came across that and were 
led to believe it was the project website, I can understand why you'd 
complain about its outdatedness since the most recent announcement was 13 
months ago today.  

> I think we as a community need to expand this knowledge.

The Gambas wiki started when I took the original Openoffice document Benoit 
created to document Gambas 0.30 (or thereabouts) and converted it into a 
format a wiki could handle so that people could add documentation and a 
static version could be created for inclusion in the IDE.  I did this 
without asking for permission and without being told to.  Only when it 
turned out to be usable (and Benoit had made many suggestions and 
improvements) did it become "the Gambas wiki", eventually being replaced 
entirely with Benoit's custom wiki code that we run today.  

In other words, the only way things ever get done in free software is 
through someone who takes the initiative.  Please don't feel you need to 
ask before doing something for the community, though it's also important 
not to get too discouraged if what you think the community needs turns out 
to be not as useful as you thought.  Starting (and keeping well-organized 
and on-topic) an examples repository would be a great idea if you have 
that kind of time.  

And time is really the limiting factor.  When I set up the original wiki in 
early 2003, I had some clients who needed a lot of Gambas work in 
preparation for a push to Linux desktop deployment, so it was easy to 
dedicate some of my time to the wiki, and to maintaining Gambas packages 
for Mandrake, and to writing gb.pcre and working on other components my 
clients needed.  Now the push for Linux desktops has turned into a push 
for thin clients and web-based applications, at least where I am, so 
Gambas is back to being just a personal interest of mine that takes up 
some of my left over free time.  If your situation affords you more time, 
I hope you'll step up.

Rob