On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 3:34 PM, Matt Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > So, what do you guys think? Is this sort of site wanted/needed?
Yes it is. > Is this list and wiki enough No they aren't. > and should our efforts be focused on them? The inevitable problem is labor. The mailing list works fine, there's plenty of labor available for answering people's questions. I can't say the same about the wiki. The documentation issues I've cared about, and that I think a lot of developers care about, are improving at a glacial pace. I won't point fingers as I've been just as lazy as anyone else. I make contributions from time to time but it's very boring and I find other things to do. Other aspects of a website, like marketing and general slickness, aren't being addressed much at all. Bill came up with a page of Really Cool CMake Features, and that's a really cool thing to have on the wiki. But it is also merely a prototype / stand-in for something that, by corporate standards, should be a lot slicker bulleted list of columns and tables comparo type of thing. I'm talking website production values. The frontal presence of CMake is ok if not exemplary. But the farther one pushes back into the wiki, the more it reeks of amateurism. People who have a long memory for the various open source communities I have offended, will remember that I went around the block with this in Python days. I'll never forget Guido chewing out his best web designer, the one who had done all the free professional quality work for him. Back in the day, the Python Software Foundation wasn't willing to buy into anyone's website vision or logo proposal. Rather, they reserved the right to dismiss and decline anything the open source community might bring to them, and wouldn't bless or work with anyone in particular. This situation was never solved. Despite the abundant talent of webmasters, amateur logo artists, and CEOs of major companies working to drive the project forwards, slick logos and Python website redesign never happened. The CEOs just folded up their tents and went back to working on their own corporate websites, not Python's. Eventually Guido went to work for Google and "adult things" were made to happen. The Python website you see today, could have easily happened 2 years earlier. Kitware, thankfully, is a much more functional partner to be working with on such matters than the PSF. The lesson of history, however, is that the controlling company's perspective and buy-in is critical. If they're not contributing a chunk of direction and labor to such an enterprise, then it probably won't get any better than it is now. Another lesson may have been that there simply wasn't enough money in website slickness for Python to compete at the pro level? Macroeconomically, perhaps Python inevitably had to be championed by a company as large as Google to really get things done. I don't know if any Pythonistas are in the house to comment on this; perhaps they can shed light on how Google has helped steward the Python community in recent years. I would like to think that once upon a time, before Google, there were a lot of well-meaning amateurs capable of great things who simply got blocked from doing them. If that is true, then all we have to do is be willing to do it. Python also had a major strategic advantage for getting this sort of thing done: lotsa web developers. Who's good at that sort of thing 'round here? I'm not. I think I'll learn how to make my own slick website before worrying about how to do it for CMake. I've always disliked web technology, as it's so godawful slow compared to 3D graphics and assembly code, but the web is definitely the key to modern techie marketing. So grudgingly, I'll see if I can stand to learn some NVU. http://www.nvu.com/ I had a website a long time ago that I used FrontPage 2000 for. That was no fun, and it never amounted to anything resembling professional production values. Cheers, Brandon Van Every _______________________________________________ CMake mailing list CMake@cmake.org http://www.cmake.org/mailman/listinfo/cmake