Re: Modules

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 06:57 AM 1/18/2002 +0000, Marco Kuhlmann wrote:

>What I propose it that we should think about going public.

eh ... it *is* public

>ConTeXt has so much to offer, it should become more widely
>used. A promising way to achieve this is to get more and more
>people involved in enhancing and documenting it. That does not
>say, of course, that base ConTeXt could and should not remain
>in the hands of PRAGMA. But an active community of developers
>working on extensions to the core is a good thing. And if it is
>well organised, it does not have to threaten the integrity of
>the system as a whole.

because at pragma we depend on this system this is a tricky thing to do; i 
already changed the policy by making code public faster that we used to do, 
which troubles me because i hate to maintain unstable code.

when something new is cooked up (currently some new things are being worked 
on), the process is rougly as follows:

1  program an experimental framework
2  use it in a project, experiment with features
3  redo the whole thing (mostly) from scratch
4  write a manual and in the process rewrite again

now, esp stage 4 takes quite some time, but is also the stage where the 
interfacing (and hooks) becomes stable. Involving more people in stage 1-3 
(currently only a few people are involved in these steps; participants can 
be customers, people on this list, others) would slow me down so much that 
it would limit my free time even more.

In the process i clean up core code; once this is done (and documented) 
other  development processes can be considered.

In the end, given enough hooks into the kernel, i can imagine multiple 
solutions showing up for the same typo problem, either or not written by me 
or others. The main thing here is to guard the interface, i.e. control the 
naming of commands and key/values.

>     What do you think?
              ^^^

i suppose you mean me -)

Hans

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