Re: GNUstep SoftWare Index - new project home and sources of the tool

[Banlu Kemiyatorn]

On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 1:03 AM, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller
<hns@goldelico.com> wrote:

> That one does not work for technical reasons. The SWI is well structured for
> automatic processing while for a Wiki you may need natural language processing
> or semantical network analysis to extract any useful information.
>
> And, the author (or any user) of a application decides what to put in the SWI.
> So you can view SWI as a feed publication platform. You write messages that
> get published in a New-Software-Versions-Feed (in HTML, RSS or PList format).
>
> The PLIst format (http://www.gnustep.org/softwareindex/plist.php) could allow 
> to
> write a Software Installer application that scans a GNUstep installation and 
> looks
> for updates. And can fetch and install them. I just wonder how that could be 
> done
> with a Wiki approach.

We don't need much of natural language processing if we set up a
policy to only use a defined template to store some reusable
informations. Parsing a templated data need not more than simple regex
works. But for a releasing process certain pages should be locked for
verified information. Mistakes from edit could always happen, but I
believe we have enough human power for typo corrections.

>
>> I'm sorry but I think GNUstep's main weakness is it's lack of man power
>> and I don't think this is helping...
>
> What do you mean with "this" in "this is not helping"?
>
> I may get it wrong but if this discussion is becoming a discussion about SWI
> and/or WIki and their benefits or problems I see this as not helping. They are
> marketing and convenience tools around GNUstep.
>
> SWI is existing and not a new effort. The Application Wiki is existing and not
> a new effort. Each one has its users and contributors. We don't invest much 
> time
> in any of them that is missing elsewhere...
>
> Nikolaus

I am just looking forward to  a system that can structure informations
that help users, allowing anyone to review the software and rate them
with stars etc, providing help and faq that make less need of
googlefoo to dive into the mailing list. An SWI could provide that but
too much effort would be bad because we rather spend time building
killer softwares that people would love to use and once we have that
we need no SWI since everybody else would want to index it for you. I
think that a software list that only contains boring softwares may
even not advertise the platform but even make it looks less
interesting, but that is just a thought, in the other thought I think
that if you believe it's right you just do it and it's good at least
for you already since the failure would just mean that you finally
learn something new.

-- 
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