"But... what if write access to the server repo ends up being controlled by an evil cabal of conservatives who reject having any of this "Starc" stuff added?"
The main thing I'm afraid of is the documentation site becoming stagnant. Too often, someone finds the arclanguage.org website and asks "How do I get version 372 of MzScheme?" Too often, someone who's been reading arcfn.com/doc the whole time finally looks at the Arc source and starts a forum thread to say "Look at all these unappreciated functions!" ^_^
I don't blame pg or kens; I blame the fact that they don't have all the time in the world to do everything they want. I'm in the same position, and I bet it's pretty universal.
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"Fire up your own server, publish the documentation pages yourself, and people will start using your documentation pages because they are more complete than the old stuff."
That could be sufficient. But then while I'm pretty active on this forum, I'm not sure I have the energy to spare on keeping a server up. If the community ends up having only people as "let someone else own it" stingy as me, we'll be in trouble. >.>;
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"My concern with the sandbox idea is that I imagine it's going to be hard to create a sandbox that is both A) powerful enough to be actually useful, and B) sufficiently constrained so that there's no possible way for someone to manage to generate arbitrary Javascript."
All I'm thinking of is some hooks where Arc code can take as input an object capable of querying the scrape results and give as output a BBCode-esque representation that's fully verified and escaped before use. But then I don't know if that would be sophisticated enough for multi-page layouts or custom styles or whatnot either. ^^;
There could also be another Arc hook that helped specify what to scrape in the first place... but in a limited way so that it couldn't do denial-of-service attacks and stuff. ^^; lol
Partly it's just a curiosity for me. I like the thought of letting Arc code be run in a sandbox for some purpose, even if it's only marginally useful. :-p
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Meanwhile, I had another thought: Even if the server doesn't allow running arbitrary code, people could still develop special-purpose things for it by running their own static site generators and putting up the output somewhere where the server will crawl. I wonder how this could affect the server design.
But then while I'm pretty active on this forum, I'm not sure I have the energy to spare on keeping a server up.
I'd be happy to run the server, and set up some kind of simple continuous deployment system so that when someone makes a code push to the server repo the code goes live.
Depending on availability and motivation I may (or may not...) end up having time myself to get Ken's documentation into a form where it can be edited (he generously offered last year to let us do this).
A part that I don't have motivation to do myself is writing the code that would crawl Anarki and generate documentation from the docstrings.
I like the thought of letting Arc code be run in a sandbox for some purpose, even if it's only marginally useful.
I certainly won't prevent someone from adding a sandbox to the server. On the other hand... if you'd like to work on something where a sandbox would be useful ^_^, I'd encourage you join me in my API project :-)
"The main thing I'm afraid of is the documentation site becoming stagnant. Too often, someone finds the arclanguage.org website and asks "How do I get version 372 of MzScheme?" Too often, someone who's been reading arcfn.com/doc the whole time finally looks at the Arc source and starts a forum thread to say "Look at all these unappreciated functions!" ^_^
I don't blame pg or kens; I blame the fact that they don't have all the time in the world to do everything they want. I'm in the same position, and I bet it's pretty universal."
I think if contributing is open and flexible people will contribute to keep the site up todate. Complete and simple instructions must exist to help and encourage people to contribute. Some is social where people feel they need "permission" to contribute.
The interesting thing I am seeing among the experimentation and projects people are doing here is the fragmentation. I think experimentation with languages are great and very necessary but it's difficult to see there isn't a main champion for the community to rally behind.
PS stupid question how are you italicizing quoted text. I tried adding <i>some text</i> but that didn't work. I haven't had enough time to play with the comments to figure that out.
