Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] What about the distributions?

[Rich M. <rd...@cf...>]

>>  > You can't "make" people do what you want. If they don't want it, they
>>  > won't do it.
>>
>>  Exactly - people have to /want/ to use Scrollkeeper
>
>What do you do for that? Light candles and pray?
>
>Let's be serious. No one will want to adapt thousand of spec files for a new
>help indexing system.

Several counterexamples come to mind.  In the Bad Old Days, most C files
contained ifdefs of the form "#ifdef SunOS", containing semi-repetitive
blocks of code.  This has mostly gone away, thanks to Configure, et al.
Nobody forced folks to adopt the new technology; it simply won because it
served a perceived need and wasn't _that_ hard to use.  Eventually, the
force of public opinion became strong enough to convince many holdouts to
convert.  If you build it RIGHT, they will come.

Also, though this is not a perfect solution, you should allow folks who
are not the original developers to create file characterizations, etc.
This way, any hacker can spend an evening earning a few egoboo points
(and perhaps learning a bit) by annotating an existing package.  I have
some flaky-sounding ideas about formalizing egoboo points, if anyone is
interested...

-r
-- 
--
Rich Morin:          rd...@cf..., +1 650-873-7841, http://www.cfcl.com/rdm
Prime Time Freeware: in...@pt..., +1 408-433-9662, http://www.ptf.com
MacPerl: http://www.macperl.com, http://www.ptf.com/ptf/products/MPPE
MkLinux: http://www.mklinux.org, http://www.ptf.com/ptf/products/MKLP