Re: Community repository proposal

On 2007-10-24 14:20:40 Lex Spoon wrote:

> John Nilsson <john@...> writes:
> > On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 12:18 +0200, martin odersky wrote:
> > > Rather than putting the
> > > other style down, it is *much better* to write great
> > > examples/turorials/libraries which show how one's favorite style
> > > can be used beautifully in Scala.
> >
> > Why not have community library? A code repository where almost
> > anyone will get commit-access. This would be used as a dumping
> > ground for code used more or less as a wiki.
>

> I like your ideas about the community contributing code.  Certainly

> patches are welcome via the issue tracker, and they do go in if they
> seem right.
>
> For most community-contributed code, however, I believe that packages
> are a betert arrangements.  Packages leave the code's author in direct
> control o that code's future.  Further, they remove EPFL from the loop
> for most decisions about propagating the package.  The authors can
> instead directly post their stuff and try to get people to use them.
>
> For package-based contributions, my best ideas are (1) posting your
> project on a site like Google Code or SourceForge, and (2) sharing it
> via sbaz.  More info is here:
>
>   http://scala.sygneca.com/projects/start
>
>
> That's just my current thinking of course, and I expect the best
> mechanisms and culture will need to be felt out over time.
>
>
> What do you and others think?  What can be done to support
> non-EPFL folks in sharing Scala code with each other?

I've been wondering about this. So here's a proposal:

There's a lot of stuff I think that various people have produced or
are considering producing at this point that ought to be 'on track' to
go into the standard library. Much of it does not warrant a project
to itself (or may be a small part of an existing project), but is
nevertheless useful. At present there is no formal mechanism for
publishing this work, beyond this mailing list and the bug tracker,
neither of which are really geared for community code review.

I propose that we will host a Git[1] repository, to which we will grant
write access to anyone (that we recognise) who asks for it. This
repository will contain a scalax._ package tree containing the
community-contributed code. We will set up a separate mailing list to
discuss this code. A second repository will be writable only by a
selection of 'influential' Scala users (list subject to nominations)
and will contain the code that passes peer review. That repository will
be published periodically via sbaz.

The purpose of this repository will be to contain the same sort of code
that is present in J2SE, the Haskell standard library, etc. and not
anything too domain-specific (for which sbaz, Sourceforge, etc. would
be a more appropriate channel). All code will be released under the
same license as Scala, and code may be moved from the community
repository into the main distribution as the Scala developers see fit.

Would this be useful? Practical? ...?

/J

[1] For our own work, we use Darcs and are very happy with it. However
Darcs has some problems that make it unsuitable for use with a publicly
writable repository. Git seems a reasonable alternative. In any case, a
distributed SCM (Darcs, Git, Mercurial, bzr, etc.) seems ideal for this
purpose.