[CM] R7RS in S7

[Iain Duncan]

The Carlos article was one of the things that got me excited about S7 too.
But I found the github current situation discouraging for first impressions.
There are a few issues to a new user/evaluator right now, and these are all
thoughts I had looking at S7 until I discovered that Bill was actively
developing, but out of view of github:

- One of the things github does is keep a name when you fork, but also show
where you forked from (if you're using the github "fork me" feature I
mean.Woody's fork shows that it's a fork from Conservatory S7, so I looked
there
- Conservatory/S7 shows 2 contributors, with only 2 commits, from 2017 to
2016, so looks like an abandone-ware fork, and the verbiage on the readme
front page makes some explanation, but talks about releases from 3 years
ago.
- Woody's fork also exhibits similarly low stats, with three contributors,
and 9 commits. The verbiage is the same

So all of these someone used to the "normal" situations on github to think
that S7 is not nearly as active or current as it is. I'm new here, so was
not going to voice these issues at this point, but as this has come up, I
wanted to voice that that was my impression when I started my scheme hunt.
I think a proper github presence would be very beneficial, but it would
make a big difference, IMHO to do the following:

- have one blessed repo, with some clear verbiage that this is the
"official" S7 repo, so that people who fork for their own private hacking
fork off that and the fork trail leads to a proper parent.
- have this verbiage be more up to date about the current situation, and
recent releases and dev
- ask folks forking for private use to form off this parent
- have commits on the official repo as frequently as possible so that it's
clear the project is alive and well. Perhaps if bill doesn't want to switch
to github this would mean some regularly scheduled and frequent sync
commits so a new evaluator can see that dev activity happens *somewhere*

These are just my experiences and opinions as an outsider who uses open
source from github regularly and who took a bit of a circular route to S7
because of the mis-impressions I got initially. I have no expectations of
people necessarily doing what I'm saying, but thought it would be
potentially useful to share my thoughts. And I am happy to help with that
if that is at all useful, whether that be helping Woody or Bill with repo
and doc management, or whatever.

BTW, I found a really nice example of documentation/profile that I may use
as a guide, in the Janet repo.
https://janet-lang.org/

thanks for listening to the peanut gallery...
iain

On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 5:54 AM Woody Douglass <
wdouglass at carnegierobotics.com> wrote:

> Sure, i'll try to continue to keep it up to date as s7 gets updated --
> again it's at github.com/wdouglass/s7
>
>
>
> On 2020-01-13 08:51:04-05:00 bil at ccrma.Stanford.EDU wrote:
>
> It's ok -- don't worry about it!  Carlos's article was
> very kind, but I believe others in that project
> preferred Lua to Scheme, so he's now using Lua (this
> info may be very much out-of-date).  Actually, if you're
> keeping your site up-to-date, your doing me a big favor --
> can I add a pointer to it to the s7 docs?
>
>
>
>
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