<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
OK, here are my belated replies throughout this thread, combined
into one message! I'll start with my overall conclusions and then
give replies to individual messages, all concatenated below.<br>
<br>
I would be quite happy to reconceptualize the Ur project site as a
community project. For me to it would be ideal for a set of non-me
volunteers to handle both the design and the hosting. It would
probably be best for me to register a domain for the site (the
impredicative.com part hasn't seemed like a good fit for a while)
but point hostnames as directed by volunteers.<br>
<br>
So, the big question: who would be interested in taking charge of
some substantial part of that kind of community effort?<br>
<br>
All of that might make sense to do simultaneously with a switch to
GitHub, or maybe the GitHub switch deserves to come earlier. One
task that makes sense to tackle concurrently with a GitHub switch is
a redesign of the Ur/Web extended standard library, which currently
is split across several Mercurial repositories. Any thoughts on
whether it would be better to have one Git repository for all of the
extended standard-library content listed as "Officially Blessed"
here?<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.impredicative.com/ur/libraries.html">http://www.impredicative.com/ur/libraries.html</a><br>
Would it make sense to maintain separate Git repos for all of them,
but maybe also provide one repo that includes all the others as
submodules? (I'm also thinking of removing the gui and meta
libraries in favor of migration of appropriate code into UPO.)<br>
<br>
On 07/28/2015 04:54 PM, Torstein Saltvedt wrote:<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAD-PwEvVPFjSM1nEdjRY5CJ-SZE7r58aLUt6XVtQu2Sz384AVw@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 7:32 PM, Adam Chlipala <span
dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:adamc@csail.mit.edu" target="_blank">adamc@csail.mit.edu</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<div class="gmail_extra">
<div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Thanks
to everyone for their thoughts on the project web site.
Here's my summary of the 5-ish opinions expressed:<br>
- It's not clear that the large background graphic from
Torstein's design is the way to go. Somehow it may be out
of keeping with the "character" of the Ur/Web project.<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Aesthetics are subjective, and although I think the
current site looks outdated, it's only one of the reasons
for the redesign and arguably the least important one.</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
Those are definitely some compelling reasons (not quoted here)!
Unfortunately, they draw largely on web-design knowledge that I
haven't bothered to develop myself. But the plan above can help get
around that problem.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAD-PwEvVPFjSM1nEdjRY5CJ-SZE7r58aLUt6XVtQu2Sz384AVw@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail_extra">
<div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
- Moving to Git & GitHub also seems like a
no-brainer. One concern about GitHub was expressed,
regarding censorship. I personally am not too worried
there, as it's easy to maintain "mirrors" of a Git
repository all over the place, to be ready in case one
main provider goes over to the dark side. The pros seem
to outweigh the cons, considering how many potential
contributors already have GitHub accounts and are used to
using GitHub.<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Does this mean that the project will adapt the GitHub
Wiki, Issue tracker and the Pull Request model as well?
Will you still accept patches through this mailing list?</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
Yes, I'm suggesting normalizing the Ur/Web community process to be
the standard GitHub one, which I think then replaces all of the
current infrastructure beyond the mailing list and the general web
presence (including demos & documentation).<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAD-PwEvVPFjSM1nEdjRY5CJ-SZE7r58aLUt6XVtQu2Sz384AVw@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail_extra">
<div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<span class="">On 07/27/2015 08:30 PM, Stefan Scott
Alexander wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Also, "eating your own dog food" would probably be a
plus. It only makes sense that a website for a web
programming language should be programmed in the
language itself.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
</span>
I'm not sure about this one. Ur/Web is for web _apps_,
not web _sites_, so it may be a mismatch for a largely
static site.<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Agreed, but it would still make for a great demo.<br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
Right, so, for that reason, I could see being convinced that it's a
good idea.<br>
<br>
On 07/28/2015 05:59 PM, Sergey Mironov wrote:<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAMOkk_Z4Lvo=oYpXWgnBctCv-eo9-Whov=XuU7YuY3m74pLEiA@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">2015-07-28 20:18 GMT+03:00 Adam Chlipala <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:adamc@csail.mit.edu"><adamc@csail.mit.edu></a>:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Sergey, anyone else out there: might I be able to interest you in
implementing and/or hosting such a service? I would be very happy to link
to it prominently from the Ur project site!
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">I am quite busy at the moment. Probably, I'll have some time next
month to address the problem if nobody wants to do it.
For inspiration, one may checkout my old half-done project
urweb-pastebin.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Neat, thanks. One other person indicated interest in building a
prototype system some time soon, and your code may indeed be helpful
as a starting point.<br>
<br>
On 07/28/2015 10:19 PM, Timothy Beyer wrote:<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:874mknvh6a.wl@fastmail.fm" type="cite">
The site needs to look trendy, so things like bootstrap widgets
would be
important in promoting Ur/Web.
Plus, a menu that toggles between desktop or mobile menu (ex.
SmartMenus [2]
with Bootstrap 3 addon [3]) also looks really modern, although it
might be a bit
overkill for this project. </blockquote>
<br>
I think I'd rather replace "trendy" with "good" in your description
above. ;) I wouldn't mind a Bootstrap-based design, though. I'm
already using the Ur/Web Bootstrap library in production apps via
UPO.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:874mknvh6a.wl@fastmail.fm" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Possibly a prerequisite for the above, but it would be cool if we had a webhost
available with Ur/Web and PostgreSQL installed so that it would be easier to
host Javascript style interactive demos. These types of demos could really
make a big selling point for Ur/Web, especially to newcomers and those
skeptical of its practical uses.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Well, it's trivial to do with a Linux virtual machine, and it will
be even more trivial once Debian and Ubuntu do stable releases that
include the new Ur/Web packages.<br>
<br>
I agree that it couldn't hurt to make it all easier.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:874mknvh6a.wl@fastmail.fm" type="cite">Not
directly related to github, but we should implement support for
syntax
highlighting libraries such as highlight.js (perfect for webpages
and
markdown), pygments (for TeX/LaTeX).</blockquote>
<br>
I agree that it's a good thing to add Ur/Web support in as many
supporting tools as possible! I don't see working on it myself (I
focused my efforts on the Emacs mode's syntax highlighting), but I'd
be glad to accept patches into the main Ur/Web source tree.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:874mknvh6a.wl@fastmail.fm" type="cite">If we
are going with github, we should also have a "Fork me on github"
ribbon
on the top right of the page.</blockquote>
<br>
Yeah, sounds like a good idea.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:874mknvh6a.wl@fastmail.fm" type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Another very useful thing would be a tutorial that doesn't assume ML and
Haskell familiarity, ideally written by someone beside me, since
Ur/Web's design has been in some sense optimized for my brain. :) Any
takers there?
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">I would like to make some tutorials at some point, although I'm curious which
tutorials people would like to see?</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Yeah, that's a good question, and it's one that I'm not so qualified
to answer, re: my general contention that Ur/Web documentation will
get stronger as it's increasingly written by people who didn't
design the language, whose likely confusion points I'm especially
unqualified to predict.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:874mknvh6a.wl@fastmail.fm" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Right now, I'm focusing on library stuff, rather than tutorials, such as GUI
components similar to what I've used on big Javascript projects, and JSON RPC.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Can you elaborate on the JSON RPC part? I can't think of anything
of that kind that wasn't already well-supported by Ur/Web and its
extended standard library 5 years ago.<br>
<br>
On 07/30/2015 05:24 PM, Istvan Chung wrote:<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:55BA95F2.5020600@vivatropolis.org" type="cite">I'd
like to express a somewhat late -1 vote for moving to git. Git has
a number of technical deficiencies compared to Mercurial. [...]
All in all, the main reason a project wouldn't want to use
Mercurial is
because it has some barrier to entry due to being less well-known
than
git. [...] The main advantages associated with GitHub are a nicer
web
interface, issue tracking, and pull requests.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I agree that Mercurial is technically superior to Git, and I believe
that holds true for both novice and expert users. The reasons for
switching to GitHub are mostly social: GitHub is now the standard
platform for open source, and it's likely that potential Ur/Web
contributors would be unfamiliar with Mercurial and do "cost
accounting" that assigns responsibility for learning Mercurial to
the Ur/Web project, which reduces their motivation to start
contributing. It's also true that pretty much everyone has a GitHub
account by now, and it reduces the barrier to entry, for
contributing code or reporting bugs, to be able to use a standard
GitHub account. Barriers to entry are also reduced by allowing the
standard GitHub tools to be used, in place of others like Mantis
that will also require from-scratch learning for most folks. (I
also think that GitHub's issue tracking is probably substantially
superior to Mantis, just because of how much simpler the former
interface is.)<br>
<br>
Overall, as for the web site design, it's misleading to analyze the
options by polling the current contributors, since there might be a
much larger population of potential contributors who were turned
away by the present configuration!<br>
</body>
</html>