I agree with the basic assessment: developers will publish and share their work in whatever way strikes them as easiest at the moment. They're primarily interested in developing, after all. A common CVS tree is miracle enough!
What I thought would be useful was a portal for users of pure data. I think I was wrong, or at least, unable to power the idea as much as it needed. Not just a portal for users is needed, but a portal for users edited by someone who is a developer, who also packages pd and it's externals for different platforms (eliminating significant user hassle), and has the patience to do so in a strong long-term commitment. Thousands registered at pure-data.org. The not-a-developer user community is obviously there. But the unanswered question is, will a combination of a portal and a set of pd+externals package maintainers would successfully meet a need of those users? Probably.
So at that point, why not build a portal around one of the existing libre-audio-software-packaging projects, and perhaps a set of contemporary artistic philosophies, i.e., subjective content as well as objective content? This is what I'm hoping to build. Of course, it will take even more energy than pure-data.org did, so I'm trying to build it with a distributed editorial process. We all joust at windmills. One of mine seems to be shaped like an internet community.
I also suggest against bickering over the site engine implementation language. Just get something reasonable from the open source community, make your 20 lines of changes, and then get back to worrying about content! Those who use the site won't care about variable declaration semantics!
All my hot air aside, one of you say the word and I'll transfer the domain. The site you build is more important than the clever domain! I will keep the existing thing up for another month or so...
On Mon, 2003-05-12 at 22:07, stm_sq^n wrote:
Hello Marc,
Tuesday, May 13, 2003, 2:34:45 AM, you wrote:
ML> stm_sq^n wrote :
the right question would be, is such a website is really needed ?
ML> Each time I try to find new information about PD, I click and google the ML> web forever. The pd webring, spider and other url lists are useful, but ML> what's needed now is a unique collaborative portal, where all softwares, ML> externals, documentation and tutorials would be collected, adapted, ML> corrected, standardized, translated...
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. 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.
Setting up a portal is not a problem, the problem is that this portal will need regular inputs to be effective and not just "NEWS_2003.05.13: today i have updated the homepage logo, hope you like it".