A Bug's Life!

This post was written for the haXe’s mailing-list. I decided to cross-post it here because I want people who do not read the list to be aware that this discussion is taking place and its place is on the mailing-list. So, if you want to participate, do so on the mailing-list.

/* Please note that this is a long post. There’s no pun intended in it. There’s no complaining for the sake of complaining, I’m not targeting anyone.
*/

Hello,

As haXe, and most important, its community, are growing, I I think that it could be a good idea to organize the community.

This would have to take into account several points :

• Wiki maintenance
• Standard haXe’s framework management
• Community management

Those are the three main concerned points IMHO. Now, let’s go deeper into each one.

Wiki maintenance

As we all know, the wiki is an important thing because it is the first thing a new-comer sees. But it’s also important because it’s where you’ll find the “official” documentation. The maintaining the wiki is difficult ATM because : anyone can edit it, it’s multi-languages.

In fact, the main problem is that it’s multi-language. So, when we change something in an English page (and we do that quite often, to reflect a point discussed on this list for example), it may not be reflected in other languages (and in fact, there are quite a lot of chances that it will not be reflected). And to be honest, there are some languages that haven’t seen any change for months. This is a very important problem because the default website one sees is not the English one but the localized one which may be really out of sync.

I know we already discussed that, but again, I think it would be good to have one person in charge for each language. That doesn’t mean that no one else should be editing it. That would just mean that this person would be a manager, eventually have a team of persons with who he could work. This is very important and would ease keeping other languages in sync with the English one.

Standard haXe’s framework management

The Standard Framework is a very important thing too, because as we all know, even if a language is really good, it’s nothing without a good framework. The thing is the framework is already *big* (don’t forget the code base is even bigger because of multiple targets) and maybe it should grow.

There are two concerns about the haXe Framework :

• We need a way to bring new things in the framework, but not anything should make it to the framework. So, we need some kind of “proposal” and “moderation” procedures.
• We need to be able to maintain the framework : accepted proposals have to be implemented, bugs have to be solved.

Here again, I suggest that we go we the “managers” way. But how to split it? By targets ? Or by API’s parts? (SPOD, JS things, …)

Community management

Ok seriously, the community is growing, and it’s not limited to this mailing-list. The problem is that we are only aware of people who uses this mailing-list because we do not organize anything else for the others. Not having “activity” community oriented also makes some people leave haXe because they feel like there’s nothing happening. I know I’ll hear the “but it’s open-source, so things are taking place everywhere on blogs, websites,… outside of haXe’s one” thing. That’s true, but we also need to centralize things. That do not mean that we need to annihilate things that are outside, but we need to organize things “inside” too. Look at “modern” languages and frameworks that made it : they organized things “inside”.

In two days, it will be 4 years since haXe development started and in a little less than a month, that it’s been first released to the public. And how many “community meeting on the web” did we have? One. ONE. Incredible! Four years, so many people dedicated to haXe, and we only had ONE meeting online. Why? Because there’s no one to organize things that are community-oriented.

If we want community-driven things, we need community-oriented activity. And we need someone to organize it.

Please note that I’m going to cross-post this to my blog so that if some people do not know that the ML is here, they can get in touch. But I want the discussion to take place here. This is the place where it has to be.

Regards,

—
DASNOIS Benjamin
http://www.benjamindasnois.com