Hi Riccardo, > Am 24.07.2024 um 23:30 schrieb Riccardo Mottola <[email protected]>: > > Hi, > > we used to have the Software Index, contributed by Nikolaus Schaller. > This piece of software went missing during the site upgrade - the old PHP > code doesn't work. > > I see three possible approaches > > 1) Try to update it and get it work again. Or maybe Nikolaus has an updated > version already?
No. It still uses some very old PHP (5.x I think) which is the reason for the pain. > 2) Rewrite it in GSWeb, possibly migrating the old DB. > 3) drop it totally. > > I like 2) because it would show off GSWeb, but it is a lot of work, I don't > know it and so I could not do much on it, at least not initially! > > I would 3)drop it though as the current state of things. I felt it like a > duplicate of the more tedious, but richer, index on Wiki, which is working > again. > > https://mediawiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Category:Applications > > Sure, the software index could have been a sort of AppStore, thus providing > binaries, information for commercial software, et al. > However, at the end of the day, it was a preconfigured list with a screenshot > and mostly tarballs. Well, the idea was to have structured data which can be read as a .plist for every record and allows for advanced search patterns. This is unlikely to work with a bundle of wiki pages. Unfortunately there was never an "installer and downloader app" to read the plist, get the url and fetch the source or binary. > > I still believe, that for the current stat and foreseeable future, the best > way to distribute GS apps is either through the corresponding package manager > of the distribution, through a specific add-on repository (which we don't > have but could) or source code. Or in future, installers. So I relativize the > use of SWI and prefer to go update the Wiki pages. The benefit of SWI would be that it is agnostic to the distribution - which can also be a bad thing if dependencies are not available... So it works for binary .app-Bundle downloads only if there is a 100% stable API and set of Frameworks. > what's your point? So if nobody cares about SWI any more, Wiki Pages are a better solution than nothing. BR, Nikolaus
