[Mono-list] CSAM, new initiative announcement

[Christophe VG]

Today mono.baselabs.org is happy to "officially" announce its new
initiative: CSAM, the C Sharp Archived Modules. A few pages were already
online for a few days, but today we have uploaded the initial control
scripts to the webserver and we now are ready to accept authors and
their modules.

CSAM: the C Sharp Archived Modules

After having enjoyed the great advantages of a comprehensive resource of
third party Perl modules, I believe we should kick-off such a great tool
for C# too. Looking back at a great example (CPAN) I've tried to bring
together the first small steps towards a unified platform for C#
modules. On this platform authors can release and present their C#
software to the public and other developers can find clean, consistently
organized modules of a higher level than the native class libraries.

Last week a single page was added to the mono.baselabs.org website
explaining in very few words what we were up to. Less than 24 hours
later two author account requests were received. This relatively huge
response urged us to build scripts that authors could use to upload and
manage their projects.

Where are we today ... ? As of today authors can use very basic tools to
present their work to the public. A small subset of functionality is
active, but the basics are there. I'm sure there are still a few bugs to
be squashed and things will go wrong from time to time. But, today I'll
send out the first author accounts, and together with them we'll upload
their first releases of their first CSAM modules, which you will see
appear on the CSAM webpages (http://mono.baselabs.org/CSAM/) rather soon
now.

... and where are we going ? We hope to see more authors of C# modules
submit their work to CSAM. It would be nice to have that central
repository of good C# modules that everybody can use. In the mean time
I'll be expanding the functionalities of CSAM to both authors and
developers. Things like a project-level CVS repository, Bugzilla
support, mailinglists, custom presentation webspace are on my mind. But
surely also nightly snapshots, automated builds and tests should become
common tools.

One thing we would also like to consider is downloadable versions of
groups of projects, eg. all projects in the CSAM.Net namespace, or even
the entire CSAM namespace, which would offer you all CSAM functionality
in one DLL. To finish this off we would off course like to have a module
and/or application to interface to the CSAM repository and let you
update your modules, as new releases are ready for grabs.

As I said before, there is still a lot of work to be done. But, do visit
the CSAM site (http://mono.baselabs.org/CSAM/) and check the evolution
of CSAM over the coming days, weeks and months as we really kick-start
this project with the first C# modules.

If you want to help out, please send a mail to csam@baselabs.org, read
the (preliminary) CSAM developers guide lines at
http://mono.baselabs.org/CSAM/developer_guide_lines.bml, or just take a
look around.

All feedback, ideas, ... are greatly appreciated.

greetz,
Christophe VG
	
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