Fw: [Oberon] Native Oberon on SourceForge

[Bernhard Treutwein]

[...]
>
> I agree with Vasile points.  (Well, most of them.

I agree also ...

> I'm not sure that NO is "orphaned".

in some sense, yes, it appears orphaned, or better
it is supported by volunteers (Pieter, Patrik & Andre)

> But someone from ETH can better comment on that).
>

absolutely.

I fear also that the three volunteers won't have very much
time in the near future.

> The answer to Chris first question boils down to
> two points, stability and end user control.  Namely
> ETH can't offer a truly stable code repository in
> the same way SourceForge can and ETH won't offer
> the same level of end user control.

hmm, there is the Jaos CVS repository hosted at ETH
see http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/jaos/download.html
so this might be possible also for other projects.

The licence for NO has changed not so long ago,
before that time, there was no real chance for an
Open Source NO. There was only OOC, but this
is the language only, not the system.

>
> Chris mentioned Guy Laden's website.  That was once
[...]
> This illustrates two problems:
>
> 1) Only Guy can fix dead links
> 2) University web storage is "transient".  For
> instance, many of the "broken links" are to
> projects at ETH that are no longer active.
>
> Fixing problem #1 is as simple as reorganizing the
> site as a "Wiki" (better end user control).

there is already an Oberon Wiki. Oops, I googled for
it and found some more than I knew before:
1. http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?OberonLanguage and
2. http://www.wlug.org.nz/Oberon
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_programming_language
and the second one explicitely asks for more input ...

> But #2 is more problematic.  Unlike SourceForge
> the "mission" of ETH is not to be a code repository.
[...]
> causing catestrophic incompatibilities.  But
> it will require much thought.
>
rethinking and discussions are necessary, but will we
really have the time for that ...

There has been an project for a unified Oberon
distribution (as I remember, it was before the times
I had jumped in, a project of Claudio Nieder, Peter
Fröhlich and others) which died silently, maybe 'cause
of lack of something like sourceforge ...

regards
      Bernhard