[Rbopensource-developer] Activity

[Fabian R. <fa...@ru...>]

So, just a question as this thing is slowly developing: How many are 
we now on this list? I was thinking we might need some sort of 
guideline on how we approach open-sourced projects in terms of :

- licenses
- documentation (I think it'd be great if we would find some form of 
code documentation standard that reflects RB's ease of use
- source code standard (standardized ways of naming classes, vars, etc)

I'd volunteer to write up a white paper (or is that blue? green?) for 
this (open to changes comments etc of course) on how the general 
process should work. There've been too many attempts imho on getting 
similar groups off the ground for standardized open RB code, and one 
of the reasons why they failed I think was the lack of proper 
procedures (no, I'm not a fan of bureaucracy, it's just that it helps 
with code).

To add to this, I'm not a fan of abbreviated variable and property 
names. While naming conventions like "cPoint" might suggest that this 
is a Point class, it makes code reading ugly. I've always thought 
that one of the major advantages of good Basic code is it's 
user-friendly human language. E.g., when I have a class that has a 
property to store ftp-passwords, I won't name that property "psswrd" 
but "FTPpassword", simply because when I read the code again two 
years later, I can immediately see what's going on.  I know everybody 
is used to a different system with this, but for joint open source 
projects it's really vital to have a working system, and the more 
explicit it is the better.

Comments?

-- 
Fabian Rueger