No offense taken. I am all for the unfettered exchange of ideas and experiences.
I will relate some experiences I have had regarding repositories of user contributed code.
I have, in the past, been very active in a number of major computer related user groups (worldwide groups for major manufacturers such as Computer Associates, IBM, etc.).
In many of those groups the need also existed for sharing of extension code.
What started out as an informal exchange eventually became a drive for a formal exchange.
In some cases the owner of the user forum was a manufacturer or the incorporated user group itself. In virtually all cases, due to legal concerns, the owners of the forum would not allow a formal repository (normally an FTP site) to exist within their environment and I had to agree.
Some groups set up an FTP site on their own independent of the forum but referred to in forum content and then the fun began.
First of all, it is a fair amount of work to manage such a repository and sometimes there is no one who will take on the responsibility. Once one is built, it is critical it be maintained.
Then there are the eventual requirements placed on submitted code. The code must function well and not cause problems (all of the caveats in the world does not seem to overcome this eventual requirement and for some reason people are more tolerant of code received from an individual as an attachment than of code downloaded from a repository). The code must be structured in at least a basic way ( author, date-written, update comments, lots of comments, variables declared at the beginning of the code, one function per line of code, etc.
email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.
