In our previous episode, Frank Church said:
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>
> Before you judge other people's procedures and actions, at least build a
> case why it could be beneficial.
>
> The last attempt (the Netscape community server engine), didn't fare so
> well, because just one person knew it.
I am not judging other people's procedures and actions. For instance I was
involved in a discussion about people's preferences for forums rather than
mailing lists.
I prefer mailing lists and newsgroups because I got used to them a long time
ago before forums and discussion boards became popular, and I was using them
before a whole current generation of computer users were born. I also prefer
them because I get to keep a whole history about issues in the group on my
desktop or my remote IMAP account. A lot of new users who cut their teeth on
forums will prefer them as they only have to google to search for stuff they
need.
Correct more or less.
They are cloud users in that sense as a lot of their data is stored
and found in the Google cloud.
That is a stretch. Google is a mere index, like searchengines have for decades. For me Cloud is still standarized SAAS
Now if I want to engage them or involve them should I tell them 'It is my
way or the highway'?
Clouds is enterprise functionality and doesn't concern clouds might have a public front that end-users know. But for them that is social maybe you should explain what you mean with clouds. At one side you are talking about end-users, and on the other hand there is talk in this thread about enterprise stuff like VMS for Amazon-EC1 cloud setups.
That some social sites that use clouds internally is an internal detail, and doesn't concern users from the site.
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I can't, I have to adapt to their way of working. I
usually post to the mailing list to seek answers out of habit, though many
times I think I could post the question on forum.lazarus.freepascal.org and
get an answer. I would probably help others with their issues a lot more if
I visited the forum, but with mailing lists I get all my mailing lists on
one page rather than having to flit from web page to web page for every
topic I am interested in.
I like mailing lists for high volume. The noise is also generally lower. But for small projects it hardly matters.
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In short I think the bar to Lazarus/FPC involvement or experimentation is
rather high and the set patterns of the more experienced developers are an
issue here. Rather than tell a user with a problem to do this or do that,
they could be pointed to a stock VM with a good set of components
preinstalled, and well configured with debugging options, good IDE settings
etc, all well documented.
It has been mentioned before over and over again. Problem is that you try to lower a hurdle that must be met with sooner or later anyway. Even if you succeed. (it is easy to imagine a perfect product, it is harder to execute it, and to keep doing it)
I think if a fraction of the time spent in such endeavour was to be put in normal release engineering, it would be much more worthwhile.
And then I'm not even talking about the fragmented nature of the OSes that you can actually freely PUT into a downloadable VM, and the various distributions differing preferences for different VM technologies.
I think such solutions are great for the educational sector (where learning is important, and managing the system and the exact target choice isn't), and it is next to useless.
But give it a try. Maybe the combined groups of education sector and a few starters is big enough to try. At least most of those users seems to gravitate in the direction of Ubuntu, and maybe that is homogenous enough.
That way they could get productive quicker and have more time in turn to
contribute, and probably leave the more experienced developers more time to
improve the Lazarus core.
People that stumble on the first roadblock will rarely become experienced developers. (while they exist, but they are essentially people that tried as teenagers, and effectively entirely restart later, e.g. when they are in college, so you could discuss if the "first" attempt counts)
For instance when Microsoft brings out their new products you can evaluate
them directly in their cloud
Where can I run free Microsoft OS VMs ?
or download a VM onto your local system for
trial.
Only with a subscription to my best knowledge.
Drupal apps are accessed through a socket. The OS they run on matters lesss. FPC/Lazarus apps typically not.
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was such stuff readily available for it. try the following searches in
Google, "vm site:drupal.org", "vm site:freepascal.lazarus.org" and check the
result count. I think there are too many* grizzled, battle-hardened, old
school, command line veterans* in the Lazarus/FPC world, a group I will
admit to being a member of.
I think you are comparing apples and oranges. Not new oranges and old oranges. Moreover you have to take the audience of the project into account.
Programming environments don't fish in the same pond as say Facebook, Farmville or even Microsoft do. Different target audience, different methods. And different means of course. Since resources are always a problem, in any opensource project.
For instance I want to use tiopf (hint, hint) and update Indy as well, and
things are looking very daunting. The code itself may be difficult,
combining with mastering the IDE as well.
I do think widening the component set would be a good idea. But that should be done beyond the current cores that are already overstretched. Do you volunteer?
