T
Thomas Mercer-Hursh
Guest
Let me point out that there are two quite separate problems here, probably more. One of these is the mechanics of the sharing. While one system has its possible advantages over another, I would suggest that for most ABL uses, the mechanics are largely irrelevant because all that matters is some way to download the code. Most projects are going to have one author and maintainer and 99% of the users are going to only be interested in the latest version, so literally a zip file link on a web page is good enough for all those cases. A very small number of projects may have more than one maintainer and for those some kind of version control, branching, etc. is useful ... but even then, I question how often that needs to be public. There is always great hope of community involvement, but in practice, not only does the community not contribute much, but even when contributions are made, they need to be filtered through the primary maintainer(s) to insure quality and standards. The other is finding the project. In the old days the PSDN source code library had a fair amount of stuff in it, but it was impossible to find unless someone provided a link. You *might* find it if someone told you about it and gave the name. If you were just poking around wondering if there was something to address a particular problem, then it was a long shot whether you would find anything before you gave up. Plus, of course, there was stuff scattered all over the web and that was even less likely to be found without being given a reference. This was the primary motivation behind OE Hive ... an incompletely realized dream of providing an organized structure where people could find things and which would motivate everyone to put there stuff there so that it could be found. If PSDN does any less than OE Hive, it is going to add little.
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