[DotGNU]Some mad ideas

[Peter Minten]

Hi folks,

here are some mad ideas that might be of use to DotGNU.

* DotGNU Book

A whole while ago we were working on a C# tutorial book for DotGNU. It might be
useful to write a book for the whole DotGNU system too. The book wouldn't cover
the basics of languages, but only how to use them with DotGNU. It would also
contain explanation about setting up and maintaining DotGNU servers.

* DotGNU Wiki

Once in a while there is some discussion about setting up a DotGNU Wiki (for
example as a todo list). However Savannah doesn't support dynamic content
(AFAIK). Is there a way to work around this and is a wiki really useful to
DotGNU?

* Central DotGNU Package fetching system

It would be nice if you would only need to type something like 'dotgnu --get
--tgz --cvs pnet' (or 'dotgnu -gtc pnet') to get the latest CVS snapshot of pnet
or 'dotgnu --get --rpm macs' to get the latest RPM release of macs. It would be
even cooler if we would use some of our webservices technology for this. I'm
thinking of the following:

There is a basic dotgnu-get client that sends xml-rpc requests to a dotgnu
webservice. The webservice then returns a download url where the file can be
found. It's basically very simple. But the system could be extended to offer
more functionality (like getting DotGNU news or sending in bugreports), also it
makes transparent load balancing between download servers possible.

The webservice would offer the following procedure for getting download info:
get_download_info(String name, String type, String branch, String version, bool
binary, bool source)

Type would be something like rpm, deb or tgz.
Branch would be something like cvs (snapshot), pre-release, release.
Version could be an empty string for the latest version.

The procedure would return an array with the following elements:
[0] Download url
[1] Filesize
[2] Version

or an XML-RPC error message.

Greetings,

Peter