[Gambas-user] Community Component Repo

[Randall Morgan]

I have seen Gambas growing in popularity over the past few years, and I
feel something like this could help it grow even more. I think one of the
reasons we see so few components is the lack of a centralized place to host
them. Giving a component author a place to host (even if it is just a wiki
page with a link to SF, BB, or GH, I think would help promote Gambas and
grow the user community. I have not seen the wiki code nor do I know all
the requirements we would need for something like this. But I can tell you
that Wordpress' plugin repo is one of the biggest factors in it's
popularity. Not all the plugins found there are useful, or even well
behaved. However, they provide a voting and comment system that also sends
comments to the plugin author for feedback. The voting system allows users
to see the most popular plugins and the comments allow users to see any
issues. Also, each plugin page specifies what version(s) it works with,
when it was last updated, and provides a link to the author's site or at a
minimum, a contact form to email him. The documentation on the page
provides basic information about the plugin and install directions. One
thing I like most about wordpress is that I can search for a plugin right
from within the admin panel. MSVS also allows me to find components from
within visual studio. It should be trivial to provide a link in the help
ide help info for a component hosting site.

For those who do not know wordpress' plugin hosting site see:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress/

A System for Gambas that provided the same basic services I think would be
a great idea! The users will sort out what components are worth
downloading, and give feedback to the developers. Just as WordPress has
integrated some plugins into their base code when they became popular,
Gambas could choose to do the same or not. Components would be there for
those who need them. Chances are if you've needed a component for
something, there is someone else out there who could also find a use for
your component. And, if your component has a few bugs, there may be someone
willing to send patches.

Anyhow, I think its important that we discuss this option for the
community. I was just looking at Apache Allura for my own interest. But it
might provide some features for hosting projects if not hosted on SF or
similar.




On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 8:24 AM, Tobias Boege <taboege at ...626...> wrote:

> On Fri, 16 May 2014, Tobias Boege wrote:
> > [...]
> >  (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.
> > [...]
> >
> > 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...
> >
>
> Speaking of this, there was once a guy on gambas-devel who proposed some
> kind of object-oriented document generation component (IIRC it would
> support
> .odt and .tex) but he apparently discontinued the work on it.
>
> The component clearly belonged to category (b) above but maybe with some
> community support (of the kind which requires an online version-controlled
> source code repository!) it would have worked out...
>
> Regards,
> Tobi
>
> --
> "There's an old saying: Don't change anything... ever!" -- Mr. Monk
>
>
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-- 
If you ask me if it can be done. The answer is YES, it can always be done.
The correct questions however are... What will it cost, and how long will
it take?