What's wrong with the board, and what should we do about it?

[Ivan Denisov]

In our interpretation, the post referred by Ivan means not 'it is difficult to track all news of "center"' but is an abstract example for Ivan ('try to read all world-news for last two months').

Sorry, I think, you misunderstood Fyodor. "abstract example" meant the threads of new forum. He for the last times has allegorical kind of speech, difficult to understand.

[ReneK]

Ivan, Whether or not the discussion on the oberoncore forum was about whatever is apparently not important. It seems to be a fact that nobody called for the adlibbed adding of a new technical solution for any problems. If that were the case, Peter would already have spoken up, right?

peter, I understand your motivation, but it is a fact that OMI said that they would not continue BB in any way, and they think the community has to do something, if the community wants to continue BB. So, to be honest, I am not sure I understand what you are wating for from their side.

[Peter Kushnir]

Well, for now anyone can do with BlackBox anything he wants, and I don't think he needs The Center for doing that. I dont know now, what Ominc will give us, and I strictly do not want to do things they've possibly already done years ago.

I have my own vision of BlackBox framework, I understand, that everybody else have it's own vision, Ominc had their own for some time, isn't the Center purposed for co-operating on these vision's implementation? What's yours, Rene?

For example, there are some components about feature X, now we decide to do StandardX, and after we done that, Ominc finally give us BB1.6 with OmincX, and it's going to be like "OK, we've done this "PseudoStandardX" so lets put in trash now". Not so cool.

[ReneK]

I agree that the "center" is a group of BB developers/users deciding on a common vision and common goal for further developments of BB, which means that the center members need to cooperate on those vision's implementation.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly, concerning "what Ominc will give us". It seems to me that you say that OMI has not given the latest sources of BB to the community. From what I understand of what OMI staff wrote on the OMI-BB-List, they did not do any changes on BB since BB1.6rc6, and there will be no further development, no further release done by OMI on BB.

We asked for documentation on BB internal sources, and we are still wating for that, but as far as I understood, no further source code will be provided by OMI. All source code necessary for the project is already in our hand.

[ReneK]

Peter,

it seems, you were right, I was wrong.

Dear BlackBox Developers,

we are pleased to announce the final release of BlackBox 1.6. You can download it via the following link:

http://www.oberon.ch/zip/SetupBlackBox16.exe

Please find attached lists with changes since Release 1.6-rc6 as well as since Release 1.5.

Oberon microsystems does not plan to work on BlackBox beyond version 1.6. All future corrections, improvements and the release management will have to be driven by the community. To facilitate this, BlackBox 1.6 is licensed under the simple 2-Clause BSD license (http://choosealicense.com/licenses/bsd/).

We have also compiled a collection of open points and patches that did not make it into 1.6. You can get them at the following URLs:

http://www.oberon.ch/zip/OpenPoints.txt

Patches by Koen Desaeger:
http://www.oberon.ch/zip/PatchesByKoenDesaeger.txt

Patches by Helmut Zinn:
http://www.zinnamturm.eu/pac/B201310070816.zip

Thanks to all of you for your enthusiasm and dedication over so many years, and your appreciation for lightweight, robust and modular software. These are qualities that are dear to our hearts, and where we feel that Oberon and BlackBox are fundamentally as relevant today as they were ten, twenty years ago. We hope that the new release makes it easier to continue using them for the coming years, and wish the community all the best!

With best regards,
Your Oberon microsystems crew

[ReneK]

I have my own vision of BlackBox framework, I understand, that everybody else have it's own vision, Ominc had their own for some time, isn't the Center purposed for co-operating on these vision's implementation? What's yours, Rene?

Honestly, I do not have a technical detail vision of the BBF (like module A needs to be changed so and so), but I do have a vision of the development and evolution of the BBF. In this post I tried to sketch this vision (paradigm 2), and I think you and I share this vision.

[Peter Kushnir]

OK, I think, I've got your opinion, Rene. Now I need to think about it.

[ReneK]

Another thing that is wrong, IMHO, is structure.

Ivan tries hard to find a structure for our discussions. In doing this, he splits threads, creates topics and so on. I get what he wants to achieve with that, but in the end this means that on an almost daily basis you have to search where which discussion takes place. It's like your wife restructuring your filing system over and over again. This is a whole lot of work for Ivan, and I feel it is contra-productive on the other side, because I am constantly looking for posts I want to quote that are simple not where they have been five minutes ago.

I do not say this to not appreciate Ivan's work, I just don't think that it's helping. But maybe it's just me and my old age.

[Robert]

I have several criticisms / comments. It could be that these issues are problems with the board, or just that I don't know how to use the board. That makes little difference, they are still problems.

- I think it is confusing that there are several different (competing) ways of communicating. We have messages like this in the board, we still have the Oms list in use, and people are still sending private emails. We would not have several communication mediums if we had one good one.

- Separation of Centre from the Community onto another new medium. That must be bad, it makes the current confusion even worse. However I accept it may also have good points, and the good might out weigh the bad. But I don't think these good points have been clearly explained.

- Maybe this message I am writing is important (maybe - I am speaking hypothetically!). But how do I have confidence that it will be seen by the right people? On the other hand maybe other people are writing important messages that I am missing. Do I have to search every forum topic frequently to be sure I see the important messages? That seems to be impractical.

- The Oms list solved the two issues in the previous paragraph (Good). But the topics were not collected into subjects, and then made available for later use (Bad). I don't know what a good answer is. The Queensland Component Pascal community board seemed to work quite well, but it was (the last time I looked) very low traffic. I can believe it would not scale well.

- Raising the discussion a bit, I think we need to consider 'Means' and 'Ends'. Forums, quorums, chairmen, center members, constitution, discussions, ..., these are all means to an end, but it is the ends that are important.

To me there are two immediate 'Ends' that we should be focussing on.

1) Establish an inclusive communication medium that works so well that there is no need to have parallel 'backup' means (private emails) and that makes the Oms list obsolete.

2) Create a stable, accessible, reference version of BlackBox. Oms 1.6 is a great start, but I (for one) suspect we should also (after suitable discussion and with suitable formality) include some patches. It is our job. Helmut has (I'm sure) done excellent work, but if we did our work well there would be no need for the confusion of multiple versions (Raw Oms 1.6, Zinn 7.10.2013 8:16, Oberoncore, Denisov Gitorious, whatever).


In time there will be more ends, of course.

Regards

[ReneK]

Robert,

I agree: A problem is something that keeps center members from doing their work, no matter if it is a "real" issue or if it is just that someone does not know all details of how to use the medium. And problems need to be solved, or we will not get much work done.

I think it is confusing that there are several different (competing) ways of communicating. We have messages like this in the board, we still have the Oms list in use, and people are still sending private emails. We would not have several communication mediums if we had one good one.

If center members used only the board and would look up new posts themselves (or if they would get automatic email notification for board posts, if they so choose), then there would be no reason to send private eMails to all the center members for center business. So, this proves your point that the board, its handling and its acceptance are not optimal, forcing us (currently) to use more than one medium. Parts of this problem could be solved by technical changes to the board, others need education.

An other thing is that when you type an answer, you can check the checkbutton "Notify me when a reply is posted", and you will get an email, whenever someone posts a reply in that thread.

The Oms list serves a slightly different purpose, since not all Oms list members are also center members. It primarily serves communication with Oms nowadays. I don't see the Oms list being completely abandoned as long as Oms keeps it open.

- Separation of Centre from the Community onto another new medium. That must be bad, it makes the current confusion even worse. However I accept it may also have good points, and the good might out weigh the bad. But I don't think these good points have been clearly explained.

- Maybe this message I am writing is important (maybe - I am speaking hypothetically!). But how do I have confidence that it will be seen by the right people? On the other hand maybe other people are writing important messages that I am missing. Do I have to search every forum topic frequently to be sure I see the important messages? That seems to be impractical.

Currently you can click on the link "new messages", and you will see all messages that have been posted since your last login. So, there is no need to search every forum. One click, and you see it all.

The problem though is, that there is no separation of "center member messages" and "wider community messages" in this link. So, you would have to wade through all messages to find the (probably more important) center member messages (more important, because the other center members may be waiting for your input on some discussion or vote! This does not mean that I do not value the questions and suggestions of non center members!)

To have a separation of the two, we need at least two boards: One for center members, one for the wider community. Both could be joined optically on one webpage, where you have one link to the center board and one link to the community board. But to participate in both, you would need to register to both of them.

So, IMHO the two points you raise here are in indirect connection: The more technically joined the center and the community medium become, the less easy it is to find important messages.

1) Establish an inclusive communication medium that works so well that there is no need to have parallel 'backup' means (private emails) and that makes the Oms list obsolete.

2) Create a stable, accessible, reference version of BlackBox. Oms 1.6 is a great start, but I (for one) suspect we should also (after suitable discussion and with suitable formality) include some patches. It is our job. Helmut has (I'm sure) done excellent work, but if we did our work well there would be no need for the confusion of multiple versions (Raw Oms 1.6, Zinn 7.10.2013 8:16, Oberoncore, Denisov Gitorious, whatever).

While I agree to these two ends, I think that one other end is necessary to be met:

Establishing a body that is able to fill the hole that Oms left by leaving BB to the community and not continuing development.

In fact, this "end" is the reason, why we even have to care about establishing a communication medium and creating versions of BB. If Oms were still doing that, there would be no need at all. But since they made their decision, we have to deal with it.

Robert, your post is important, and at least it shows two issues:

1) In discussing the technical solution to the current board situation, we didn't do an analysis of what problem we need to solve. Probably we should do a quick survey (not a vote! Just some questions of what is important (and how important) for the individual members - multiple choice, grading system of answers) of how center members want to communicate, and then see how to make ends meet technically, instead of popping out alternative solutions.
2) There are some, who are forum savvy, and others are not. We have to get everybody up to date on the technical usage of the medium, and we have to make the handling as easy as possible.

And of course, we need to have our vision straight. If we do not know where we are going, every way is equally bad.