[Gambas-user] Community Component Repo

[Tobias Boege]

On Fri, 16 May 2014, Randall Morgan wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> Is there a standard place on the web for folks to upload and share their
> gambas components?
> 
> If not, do you think it would be a good idea to create such a place.
> Something similar to the Wordpress plugin site maybe.... A place where
> folks can upload and share their components, document them, and provide
> contact information to users of their components.
> 
> I have found a handful of gambas components across the web. Most for gb2.
> It would be nice to have a central location for them and perhaps a way to
> search that location from the ide, or at least a link in the ide help
> browser.
> 
> The new wiki site may or may not be a good place for this. Anyone have any
> thoughts on the matter?

Do you know [0]? It is not a "platform" but maybe someone can develop it to
be one now that the wiki source code is more modular.

The advantage of doing it inside gambaswiki.org would be that the folks can
benefit from the existing wiki code: you mentioned that people may also want
to document their components there. Well, that would not be difficult to
implement because the wiki logic is already there and running.

I just asked myself: why did that question didn't pop up earlier? I think
the answer is that all the components I've seen are of exactly one of three
kinds (I, myself have one of either kind):

 (a) very special-purpose and therefore on the author's or the author's
     client's computer or on his website;
 (b) unstable and therefore on the author's computer, where it belongs :-) or
 (c) general-purpose and at least runnable: then it's in the official source
     tree already.

Now, if you think that I want to put your idea down: not so. The reason that
I haven't seen usable components outside the official tree could also be
*caused* be the lack of such a platform. I don't think it would do any bad.
And if a general-enough component is found there, we can kindly ask the
author to maintain it in the official tree later, too.

BUT providing a place to describe and document your component is the less
important thing, IMHO. It would be more important to include a system where
component developers can work on their components, in a version-controlled
manner (!) and show their code to others without having to tar the sources
(*cough* SVN would be ideal so we can easily integrate good components into
the official tree *cough*). That *could* boil down to creating distinct
branches of Gambas on SF's SVN repository...

However, I would really like to hear other's opinions before thinking
further.

Regards,
Tobi

[0] http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/dev/gambas_components

-- 
"There's an old saying: Don't change anything... ever!" -- Mr. Monk