stm_sq^n wrote :
indeed such a portal would be helpful for anyone. but when i said if it was needed, i was trying to point the fact that the pd community is still very anarchic, looking like a sea of urls, sometimes a real maze even for advanced users to get the right info in less than 15 clicks.
Providing a portal to a community doesn't mean it has to stop being anarchic, on the contrary; its purpose is to organise anarchy... (I believe anarchy is the building block of all organisations) For example, developpers are using sourceforge for the specific task of managing their source code, but they can always design a funky web page. The portal would help aggregate PD resources, not prevent creativity.
Now, if we want to try to build a kind of centralised portal (an effective one) this should also mean that most (all?) of the dev/active-users would have to play the game and make this portal a living place by updating their work, pieces of code and researches up to date, and i'm afraid (i would like to be wrong) that they will just keep sticking on their little "urls network" for any reasons whatever it's good or not.
There could be "maintainers", a bit like in the Debian GNU/Linux community. One would maintain a big project like Gem while another would maintain a bunch a small externals. The maintainers would seek help for speficic problems like ports to other OS, help patches, documentation, translation, etc. We should give it a try...
-- Marc
"I'll play it first and tell you what it is later." (Miles Davis)