Posted by Chris Uppal-3 on Apr 26, 2004; 10:31am
URL: https://forum.world.st/What-has-happened-to-Dolphin-Harbour-tp3370442p3370443.html

Sean Malloy wrote:

> The OA wiki is locked down, so what should be the mother source of
> information is stagnate aswell. Which leaves the news groups as really the
> only place where there is a flow of information about Dolphin. I hate news
> groups!

That's unfortunate, because this NG is *the* place for the dissemination of
information and the exchange of ideas.  It works very well too (IMO) -- much
better than some "discussion forum" software on some website somewhere.

I find the wretched "forums" are excruciating to use. There are a couple that I
have to read since they are the only source of information that I need, but I
use them *very* reluctantly.   If the Dolphin community ever moved to one of
those then it could say bye-bye to me (this may be considered an advantage of
such a move of course)

Wikis are all very well as a place to *record* information, but I've rarely
come across anything as lame for the *exchange* of ideas.  Using a wiki to hold
a conversation is silly.  Even using it to "grow" a knowledge base seems to
work rather badly because no-one (naturally) wants to delete anything that
anyone else has written, so you end up with a base paragraph followed by a
bunch of riders added by other people, rather than providing the reader with a
coherent and up-to-date view of the matter in hand.


> Anyways, the Dolphin community sources/links are extremely fragile at
> best. I'm _still_ finding new Dolphin sites where pac files have been
> published. Dolphin Harbour seems to be one example of something done
> right, but it has stagnated!

I very much agree about the risks and problems of a community who's "static"
content is structured as a collection of independent websites.  But what are
the alternatives, and can you get the people (like me) who construct such
things to "buy into" a centralised repository ?   I'm not saying you can't, but
there'd have to be a considerable advantage *to me* before I'd want to cede
control over my public software to another entity.  E.g. there's no way that
I'd use SorceForge for my stuff.

It's definitely something to think more about, though.  If I had a more
constructive proposal then I'd make it.


> The Smalltalk community in general is hard to traverse. There is so many
> broken links, and so much dead content. Someone needs to clean it up.

That's the nature of the Web.  If you'll forgive me getting gnomic, it only
lives because it can die.  If you want to lock stuff down, and keep it all
packaged nicely, then you'll risk massive stagnation if people find that
contributing to a centrally-managed resource is more effort (e.g. changes to
their working practises) than it's worth.

    -- chris