[CMake] cmake community site

[Brandon Van Every]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 3:34 PM, Matt Williams <lists at milliams.com> wrote:
>
>  So, what do you guys think? Is this sort of site wanted/needed?

Yes it is.

> Is this list and wiki enough

No they aren't.

> and should our efforts be focused on them?

The inevitable problem is labor.  The mailing list works fine, there's
plenty of labor available for answering people's questions.  I can't
say the same about the wiki.  The documentation issues I've cared
about, and that I think a lot of developers care about, are improving
at a glacial pace.  I won't point fingers as I've been just as lazy as
anyone else.  I make contributions from time to time but it's very
boring and I find other things to do.  Other aspects of a website,
like marketing and general slickness, aren't being addressed much at
all.  Bill came up with a page of Really Cool CMake Features, and
that's a really cool thing to have on the wiki.  But it is also merely
a prototype / stand-in for something that, by corporate standards,
should be a lot slicker bulleted list of columns and tables comparo
type of thing.  I'm talking website production values.  The frontal
presence of CMake is ok if not exemplary.  But the farther one pushes
back into the wiki, the more it reeks of amateurism.

People who have a long memory for the various open source communities
I have offended, will remember that I went around the block with this
in Python days.  I'll never forget Guido chewing out his best web
designer, the one who had done all the free professional quality work
for him.  Back in the day, the Python Software Foundation wasn't
willing to buy into anyone's website vision or logo proposal.  Rather,
they reserved the right to dismiss and decline anything the open
source community might bring to them, and wouldn't bless or work with
anyone in particular.  This situation was never solved.  Despite the
abundant talent of webmasters, amateur logo artists, and CEOs of major
companies working to drive the project forwards, slick logos and
Python website redesign never happened.  The CEOs just folded up their
tents and went back to working on their own corporate websites, not
Python's.  Eventually Guido went to work for Google and "adult things"
were made to happen.  The Python website you see today, could have
easily happened 2 years earlier.

Kitware, thankfully, is a much more functional partner to be working
with on such matters than the PSF.  The lesson of history, however, is
that the controlling company's perspective and buy-in is critical.  If
they're not contributing a chunk of direction and labor to such an
enterprise, then it probably won't get any better than it is now.

Another lesson may have been that there simply wasn't enough money in
website slickness for Python to compete at the pro level?
Macroeconomically, perhaps Python inevitably had to be championed by a
company as large as Google to really get things done.  I don't know if
any Pythonistas are in the house to comment on this; perhaps they can
shed light on how Google has helped steward the Python community in
recent years.  I would like to think that once upon a time, before
Google, there were a lot of well-meaning amateurs capable of great
things who simply got blocked from doing them.  If that is true, then
all we have to do is be willing to do it.

Python also had a major strategic advantage for getting this sort of
thing done: lotsa web developers.  Who's good at that sort of thing
'round here?  I'm not.  I think I'll learn how to make my own slick
website before worrying about how to do it for CMake.  I've always
disliked web technology, as it's so godawful slow compared to 3D
graphics and assembly code, but the web is definitely the key to
modern techie marketing.  So grudgingly, I'll see if I can stand to
learn some NVU.  http://www.nvu.com/  I had a website a long time ago
that I used FrontPage 2000 for.  That was no fun, and it never
amounted to anything resembling professional production values.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every