[fpc-pascal] OT: Creating a site to contain Pascal units, libraries etc

[Tomas Hajny]

On Tue, October 30, 2012 12:49, ik wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 2:29 AM, Jeppe GrĂŚsdal Johansen
> <jjohan07 at student.aau.dk> wrote:
>> Den 30-10-2012 01:04, ik skrev:
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> There are many places such as GitHub, Google Code, Sourceforge etc,
>>> that hosts a lot of open source projects, libraries etc for
>>> FPC/Pascal.
>>> On the other hand we have fppkg that can have repositories and able to
>>> allow us remote download and install of code.
>>>
>>> Ruby has the following web site that allow you to find and have a
>>> single place to install such things:
>>> https://rubygems.org/
>>>
>>> I think that web site like this, with the ability to add fppkg sources
>>> that other can look for and install will benefit everyone, reduce
>>> duplicate work, and
>>> help us find Pascal tools :)
>>>
>>> What do you think ?
>>>
>>> Ido
>>>
>>> * I sent it originally for FPC-Others, but it does not appear there
>>> even in the archive
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> fpc-pascal maillist  -  fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org
>>> http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
>>
>> I like the idea, but who can make such a site?
>>
>> There are many different more or less dormant or noisy pages around the
>> net
>> sometimes with sourcecode, but much of the time dead links. And when you
>> finally end up those places things are locked into broad categories with
>> 1000's of entries to wade through. And there's no way to measure how
>> good
>> the stuff actually is except for downloading it and looking at it,
>> finding
>> out when it was last updated, licenses, supportt, etc.
>>
>> Some ideas:
>> - Allow limited hosting of open-source text source files(they compress
>> well
>> so it doesn't take up much hosting space).
>> - Allow projects to be tagged with arbitrary tags instead of having
>> categories, and let users vote tags up or down.
>> - Require basic information which can be easily presented: Source
>> license,
>> tested+supported platforms, external requirements, contact information,
>> etc.
>> - If the project dies then allow users to specify new locations that
>> eventual forked source can be found at.
>>
>
> My idea is more about finding tools then to host them.
> fppkg allow us to create packages to be installed from remote, and
> also look for such things.
> So why not harness it to the point that we can find libraries and
> tools at one place, regardless of the place the code actually hosts ?

In my experience, one should first thing about how it should work and only
then about tools which may help rather than vice versa. In this case, the
important point is management of the content (e.g. references to the
external repositories and associated metadata providing information about
the referenced content).

Tomas