[Info-vax] Looking to find a way to pull all the Open Source / Freeware folks together

[Hunter Goatley]

On Oct 19, 1:49 am, hel... at astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---
remove CLOTHES to reply) wrote:
> In article <fKmdndE-Ya-BGV_XnZ2dnUVZ_jadn... at earthlink.com>, "Bill
>
> We need a one-stop shop.  Get the latest version of everything at one
> place.  HunterGoatley'sserver has been a good source for years.  Most
> of our problems would be solved if everyone would use Hunter's server
> for the latest (stable, i.e. non-test, non-beta) version of a package.
>
> Assuming, of course, that Hunter is willing to carry this burden.
>

I did for many years.  After a while, people stopped coming to me, and
I had to seek them out, and some people responded and some didn't,
and eventually we got where we are today.  I'm still happy to host
packages,
but lots of people like to host it themselves (as Steven indicated).

> Come up with a unified scheme for packaging and building.

That was what I did with virtually every package added to my archive.
I used Zip to distribute the files, I made sure they all included some
way
to build, either a BUILD.COM or an MMS/MMK file (I often created one
of those for packages that I received that didn't have one), and for
most,
I included object files and a LINK.COM to generate .EXEs from the
supplied
binaries for those without access to the necessary compilers.

It was a lot of work, but I believed in doing it to make everything as
easy to
use as possible.

> Documentation: Best would be HELP files which can be inserted into a
> library for third-party products (i.e. not from HP and not from
> individual users for their non-shared stuff).  Is it too much to expect
> BOOKREADER documentation?

I did that, too, for the bigger projects (HGFTP).

I'm happy to help in whatever way I can, but there are so many
different
homes for things, I'm not sure a single repository can be done now.
In
some cases, I would mirror other distributions, but then ran into the
problem
of people not letting me know when they updated the packages, thus
causing
my archive to get out of date.  And I ran out of free time to track
them all
down, which I used to do.

Hunter
-------
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