World: r3wp

We are glad to announce that a newer version of the rebol.org package 
downloader is now available for people using REBOL|view 1.3.2

as usuall, type the following in a rebol console to open up the tool. 
it now adapts to version automatically
<pre>do http://www.rebol.org/library/public/repack.r</pre>

also note that I put a lot of effort in optimizing the file's final 
size, including a lot of hacking out, removing comments, compressing, 
etc... its now a much smaller download.
This version uses a slick 
new version of GLayout which has gfx largely based on Henrik's tests 
which he supplied a few weeks ago...

Thanks for doing that Maxim!

my pleasure... only strange that my last post ended up  here... it 
was a copy/paste of info in this group meant for another group.. 
hum...

Glayout is LGPL.   What does that mean for any script using Glayout??

that you can use it without your tool being confined to GPL.  any 
changes to bring to GLayout must be made available on demand.

unless you include GLayout *within* your script, in which case, your 
app is now GPL.  but I'll be happy to give people non LGPL versions 
if they really need it  (if they ask nicely  ;-)

So, if you are happy to give people non LGPL .. why not release as 
BSD or something else?

cause I'm a control freak  ;-)

I have been thinking about it.

(aren't we in the wrong group?  ;-)

Basically my experience is that anything that has the word GPL in 
it does not get used.

If you want to promote your glayout .. you need to change the license 
.  See rebgui's license.

unless it also has the letters mysql  ;-)

LGPL does not impede useage by forcing your apps to become open source.

I'm not sure people know the difference between the lesser GPL and 
GPL.

http://www.rebol.net/article/0243.html<--- some interesting points 
regarding GPL here.

downloader: Download DIR should be create if it doesn't exist.

talking about newer repack.r?

the file browser allows you to create dirs... although I admit auto-creation 
of typed paths in the field is a good idea (maybe with a little req 
asking for confirmation)

is it possible to have scripts editable by anyone?

without owners, or with more than one?

I am starting to wonder if there is now more collaboration in the 
community, such that we could start compending libs of utility funcs, 
instead of separating them in tens or hundreds of separate files.

using official REBOL style guide and wrapping every lib within a 
CTX object and possibly an extra function which exposes the words, 
instead of forcing them directly using 'set.

maybe officializing a naming convention so they have a distinct name, 
making them easy to identify by peers.

maxim, a script wiki?

something like  lib-org-whatever.r   ?

yeah sort of

rebol.org has everything needed to manage it, including documentation, 
forums, users, excellent indexing on google (thanks to carefull work 
by sunanda).

and its pretty bot defensive  :-)  meaning there is little chance 
our work will be defaced.

http-tools is a good example.  I have some stuff, you have some stuff, 
there is A LOT of it here and there.

it would become public domain, meaning you relinquish rights to what 
you submit, unless someone wants to organize a rebol source foundation, 
and then we can have the foundation be the authorised copyright owner 
of the peer-reviewed libs.

I have advocated for this years ago... before rebol.org became organized 
by sunanda and team

but its hard to have rebolers working together... something about 
all of us being free thinkers...

well, there are some things that I've found to be astonishingly effective 
and that is asking questions in here. there is almost always an answer 
so you can get your code working.

but this is a closed world, it gets lost,  some ppl leave,  and it 
prevents the platform to grow.  seems like we are always rebooting 
the community every few years...

well, I guess that's how things are right now. I do find it to be 
a bit elitist, you have to ask permission to come in here and most 
of the people know each other somewhat.

the IRC channels I visit can be a bit the same. It's like being a 
stranger walking into a bar full of people who know each other very 
well. either you are accepted or not.


The elitist thing is not meant at anyone here, but I think it can 
be seen as elitist from the outside. :-)

There have been a number of initiatives in this area, but none have 
taken hold. I think it's *very* important, and have wanted it for 
a long time, but the hard part is coming up with a design that will 
work for everyone, since there is no standard for modules and libraries. 
I'm hoping R3's module design will address this, and give us the 
common ground we need to do something like this.

Part of the "problem" is that REBOL is really built for programming-in-the-small 
today, and being interpreted, you can't optimize out things you don't 
need--not without a preprocessor of some kind. It also lends itself 
to simple, direct word use, not the more verbose context/func approach. 
That makes it harder to build effective libraries. 


I've often thought that the best approach might be a simple library 
of "global" functions, which would basically add to the available 
words in REBOL, so they should be very generic, and there might be 
a lot of them. More complex modules would be contexts, and we'd need 
an agreed upon system for naming, exported words, etc.

Collecting things is a good first step, but then we quickly need 
to consider something like Ladislav's #include function  and a context/module 
standard.

I've been dumping functions on Big Bold's snippet repository; it's 
easy and provides visibility to non-REBOLers, but you can't search 
for stuff by tags and there is no collaboration system of course.

Hi All,  I have often discussed the stuff... I have done more than 
just propose, I have coded an open framework to handle libraries.

it has been used, I use it daily.  I have been using it for several 
years now.  and it does many things more than include.

I'm not saying its perfect.  never have, but it was supposed to be 
a starting point where people could agree on a platform for sharing 
code.

it already handles all of what Carl proposes wrt modules.  except 
what can't be done like namespacing, and memory protection, which 
have to be hard-coded in the interpretor.

its on rebol.org its called slim.r

but the basic issue with the REBOL community in general is its lack 
of unity....  Most of us are free thinkers.  We do our own, cause 
we can !  :-)

its funny that Gregg brings this up (again) cause I was chatting 
to sunanda about setting up  a special part of rebol.org.

which has no "scripts"  but actually  "libraries"

either tool sets or individual utility functions.