On broken wheels and user contributed code

I agree that there should be some infrastructure for users to upload
code which they would like to share with others. However using
sourceforge file release system is in my opinion too complicated. I
suggest we use one of the hosted applications which are provided by
sourceforge. I think that trac and phpBB allow attachments to be
uploaded. My recommendation is to create a phpBB forum for user
packages. That way there is also the possibility to comment on the
packages and even for the author to provide support for the users.

Lp, Andrej



On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 12:41 AM, Harald Geyer <harald at lefant.net> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> In the past few weeks there were several code snippets posted to
> this ML which finally did not get included into maxima for various
> reasons. It has been suggeted to archive that code on the wiki, but
> that solution seems somewhat impractical.
>
> While it is great so see that maxima is gaining momentum lately it
> also indicates some lack of infrastructure. I guess the time for some
> kind of comprehensive maxima archive network isn't here yet and I
> don't like the suggestion unhappy users should fork the project either.
>
> What I believe would be a proper solution is to start a new project
> maxima_contributed_code (hosted either on sourceforge or somewhere
> else) which has less strict write access rules. That project would
> collect code not part of "original maxima" and release it in some form
> that can be dropped somewhere in the share directory of a typical maxima
> installation without disrupting the core maxima. Perhaps Ziga is willing
> to take the job of setting up the project and doing the basic
> administration tasks like giving people write access and maintaining
> the releases?
>
> On a technical note: IIRC maxima recently switched the package load
> infrasructure from static list of pathes to dynamic searching. Maybe
> some tweaks to exclude the contributed_code directory from automatic
> searching would help to avoid namespace conflicts. I'm sure something
> like that can easily be set up. Perhaps .../share/uc/ would be an apt
> prefix.
>
> On the specific issue of $table: I don't think multiple facilities which
> provide the some functionality are a bad thing per se as long as all
> but one of them are clearly marked as deprecated in the documentation.
>
> HTH,
> Harald
>
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