What on-line resources do Tclers want?
Table of contents
At The
Fifth Tcl/Tk Workshop '97,
attendees had the opportunity to submit written cards
describing ideas for enriching the on-line resources
available for learning and using Tcl and its extensions.
This page transcribes and annotates those submissions.
All entries appear verbatim, with the exception that
participants' names and e-mail addresses are not visible
(although generally available on request).
The majority of these cards came from a broad spectrum of the attendees
at Tuesday night's BoF; a few more appeared at Wednesday's poster session.
Software archived reorganised to better convey what
is present and what is missing. [CL: I agree that there
has been considerable dissatisfaction in the past--even
the recent past--with the
official
Tcl archives. However, a
couple of new initiatives, which I'll explain soon in
this space, should address most of the concerns and
deficiencies.]
A contrib archive sorted by TclTkversion (because
lots of stuff in the current archive is 3+ years old ...)
[CL: More on this subject, soon.]
FAQs access by some search technology so that only what
matches keywords is returned
Newbie FAQ to be mailed to first time posters to
comp.lang.tcl [CL: Certainly there are several other newsgroups
that have automated this successfully.]
How To:
http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO
- Getting Started
- Safe-Tcl
- Multiple Interps
- Plugin
- Making Extensions/Packages/Widgets
- Major Extensions
- Sockets/Networking
- Compiling/OSes
[CL: This is a good list, in the sense that questions on these topics
certainly recur in comp.lang.tcl;
however, it's also true that information on most of these is already
available online--more on that, later--so perhaps the fault is
simply one of advertising what exists now.]
[LVW: I think the idea is that even though most of the info
is available elsewhere , building a set of HOWTO documents,
which then can either be referenced, or bun dled with one's
software, makes things easier for the provider of software.]
FAQs rewritten to use
Tcl
FAQ Format, enabling various
output formats
FAQs rewritten to use
Linux SGML DTD
[CL: I've called this the
QWERTZ
system at times, because there's a line of descent
there, but I now see that that relation is really of only
historical interest; the Linux DTD is on its own developmental
pathway]
allowing high-quality output
[CL: So how do we decide between these alternatives?]
Software catalog converted to use
Linux .lsm format
Index the documents with WAIS. KL offers to provide the software
to CL.
CGI.Tcl FAQ is
http://expect.nisg.gov/cgi.tcl/FAQ.html
[CL: The point here is that this entry has been missing from
Larry Virden's otherwise-comprehensive
comp.lang.tcl
FAQ launcher.]
I think it would be very useful if there was a list
of known bugs in tcl/tk.
[CL: I strongly agree--in fact, I think this is paramount.
These sorts of management tasks that no one particularly
relishes inevitably have enormously beneficial results, in
my experience. The natural home for this chore seems to
be with the team at Sun,
but perhaps Jan Nijtmans is
closer to making it real.]
Use Collaborative Filtering! Share your Knowledge!
GroupLens
Last time I looked the on-web man pages [CL: presumably
those the entropy liberation front maintains at
elf.org]
didn't include namespace.
Man pages in French.
Summary paragraphs on
Expect
sample programs [CL: That is,
it'd be much appreciated if someone would volunteer to
document these otherwise quite pleasing demonstrations.
Someone did, we believe, at the BoF, but our notes from
that evening haven't surfaced yet.]
"Another interesting idea was that of creating a sort of 'road map' for
a new developer in
expect.
This would guide the reader thru the masses
of information so that they can find the most useful place to begin
reading."
Brent Welch's generously provides
sample chapters of his
second edition intro to Tcl, covering many useful topics.
Larry Virden and
Cameron Laird
collected these suggestions at
a BOF and a poster (appearing as panels
one,
two, and
three)
session they sponsored at the Conference.
The organization and annotation of the entries will continue
to change quite a bit in the summer of 1997, and probably through
the end of the year. If there's anything above that's unclear,
or missing a reference that you'd find useful, please
let me know; I'll
generally turn around such requests within twenty-four hours.
In fact, I'm eager to add new ideas; they don't have to have
been mentioned at the Workshop.
Cameron
Laird maintains this
page/claird@phaseit.net