[ANN] IDE Development Option

[Scott Rossi]

Oh Grandest of Poobahs and MC List:

I've watched a fair amount of discourse fly on the list regarding "open
source this" and "SourceForge that", and I'm wondering if it might be time
to just dive into some kind of development option.  So, I went ahead tried
to do something, for better or worse.

I took apart all the substacks of the MC 2.5 environment (as many as I
could), placed them all on a server in separate folders, and assembled a
first pass at a stack management system.  The stacks have been named using
typical "copy of..." (MC standard) and stored on the server this way to
avoid potential naming conflicts once downloaded and run within MC.

The stack manager can be accessed via your message box here:

  go stack url "http://www.i-view.net/tm_stack_manager.mc"

If it works correctly, you should be able to get a list of available files
on the server, locate and download stacks to your drive (you must specify a
working directory in which to save downloaded files), and then upload the
edited stacks back onto the server.  Names that are grayed out are
unavailable.  Please be aware that if many folks try this at the same time
they may end up being unable to access stacks as there is a simple mechanism
in place to prevent multiple editors working on a single stack.

Before the complaints ensue, no, this is not a full blown content management
system, and no, there is not extensive error checking -- this is a first
attempt that is designed to officially allow one person at a time to edit a
portion of the IDE.  It's a simple feature set -- "check something out, work
on it, and check something in when you're done with it."  The next step is
for someone to create an IDE compiler that assembles all the stacks into a
single editor.

If this seems useful to folks, let's talk about how this can be
enhanced/developed/customized/etc.  Maybe we can start getting some work
done.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design
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E: scott at tactilemedia.com
W: http://www.tactilemedia.com