Re: Idea of a new Ada website.

["Stephane Richard" <stephane.richard@verizon.net>]

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<Lionel.DRAGHI@fr.thalesgroup.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.15.1061982647.318.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> Hi Stephane,
>
> I agree whith Martin.
> When we decided sometimes ago with Sam to redesign Ada-France www
> (http://www.ada-france.org), we discussed what could be done to help Ada
> through the net.
> Hosting Ada project was not a real need, SourceForge and other are already
> available. Indeed, this is not so easy to administrate. One may even argue
> that it's better to have Ada projects hosted on SourceForge or Savannah
than
> on a specific server, to increase Ada visibility.
>
> AdaIC, AdaPower and maybe some others are pretty good Ada site. Obviously,
> you could always better something, here the usability or here get a better
> look, etc., but this is a lot of work with very few added value for the
Ada
> community.
>
> Our conclusion was that the only real need is :
> 1 - a news portal : when you see that some Ada web page are several month
> old, it could gives an impression of a dying interest/support for Ada. On
> the other side, there is hardly one week without a tools/library/etc.
> version announce on cla.
>
> 2 - a collaborative site : this is a good way to share the work, get
> information quickly, documents up to date, etc.
>
> 3 - and also a sexy look, to avoid the impression that Ada is an old
> military thing, and confirm that there is an active community.
>
> To conclude, i retains much more interesting the Ada Wiki or the Ada
webring
> idea than doing another AdaPower/AdaIC/SourceForce/etc.
>
> -- 
> Lionel Draghi              http://swpat.ffii.org/index.fr.html
>
> PS : we are still looking for volonteers to give ada-france web a more
> convenient look (and to write news). Any volunteers?

Here's my point of view on the project parts.

1. The first reason I had to want to do this isn't really a new sourceforge
lookalike per say.  I'm offering this only as an alternative as far as
project sources/distributions are concerned.  Maybe some programmers simply
dont want to go through all the steps and different project management
methods that are at sourceforge.   Maybe they just want a place to put their
sources and distributions so others can download them and have a "wiki" or
something like it to keep others informed on their work.  a lot of users may
also have their own version control system at home so they can do that part
locally and only post a new version when they see it fit.

2. As I said in 1.  I do plan to offer WIKIs for the projects, whether they
are hosted on the website or not.  Visitors might still want to be updated
on a given project they know about.  I'm not trying to be the only place
where anyone can find Ada development projects.  but that also brings me to
point 3.  But essentially, the purpose of my website is to tell visitors
"this is to give you an idea of what Ada can do for you".  I expect a lot of
visitors will be curious about Ada. and will want to know this kind of
information before they thrown themselves into learning it, or converting
projects to Ada.

3. Without searching in the project tree at sourceforge, have you every
tried to search for a given type of software, at sourceforge.  One of the
missions of my website is to promote Ada (in all it's aspects) and
development projects are definitaly one of them.  however, I find it hard to
see if any project pertaining to a specific category are built in Ada.
Source forge has no biased programming language per say, and that's good for
what they do, they promote OpenSource software.  Not the same goal as the
website.  I dont want people to see everything that's happening in the Open
Source community, I want to "highlight" what's being done in Ada itself.

In that line of thought, yes WIKIs will be there.  Hosting of projects is
not a must, it's an option to those that dont feel they need all the
resources available tot them at sourceforge but do want a place where people
can download their projects.  I'll gladly provide links to any ada projects
hosted on sourceforge, and treat them as any other project, give them the
ability to have their own WIKIs, talk about their projects, post surveys to
know if they are going in the right direction or see what new "user
suggested features" they can look at implementing, etc etc.. They will also
be a user's forum for general Ada discussions, in there will be an
annoucement categories where developers will be able to post new
annoucements about their project, be it a new version made available, a new
idea for a project (which they might want to know if it's a good idea, if it
has potential and the likes).  :-)

Then there's the regular contents a website should have, like a feedback
form, news, ada adcocacy (brag about ada basically :-)....

-- 
St�phane Richard
Senior Software and Technology Supervisor
http://www.totalweb-inc.com
For all your hosting and related needs