[Ecls-list] Adding Libraries....

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Brad Beer <bradwbeer at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a first draft for openGL and GLU bindings for ECL. I need to test
> them some more and add a few esoteric functions (callbacks and functions
> with more than 10 arguments) but the majority of them look good. How should
> I submit them to the community? Do I make a new project, send it to the
> mailing list for review, or just submit them as a patch (under ./contrib?).
> As soon as I have some of these working I wish to add cairo, pango, pixbuf,
> and SDL libraries as well.

You should ask yourself a few questions first:
- How big is the total of bindings in kbs, including the expected size
of all you want to produce.
- How different are they from existing libraries -- are they just
ports or ECL-specific.
- How much time do you want to spend in maintaince of the libraries
vs. relying on collaboration.

If the total size of bindings is one or two hundred Mb, then it
probably does not matter adding it to ECL. However, if it is going to
be larger, then it should be organized in a way that people get only
what they need. By having separate source trees for each component and
teaching ECL about the location of those, this can be automated to a
large extent.

Now, if it is large and outside the ECL core, then where should it go?
One possibility is integrating it in the ECL respository, creating a
directory for contributions that are really optional and
platform/os/gui-specific, as opposed to say unicode formats or socket
libraries (forget for a second ecl-win32 which is not maintained). We
could arrange the bug tracking facility with new subclasses, decide
whether it should all go in the same GIT tree or separate, and give
you appropriate permissions. This has the advantage of delegating on
hopefully new developers for smaller fixes and keeping it all
together.

The other alternative is setting up a separate project, for which I
would recommend common-lisp.net, as they ask close to nothing for
opening the project, and give reasonable CVS/svn/git/darcs systems,
together with webpages and optional mailing lists -- I would not mind
if you create none and use ecls-list at lists.sourceforge.net for
announcements and the like

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com