We've talked at length for years about a foundation or committee of engaged Rebol users to help manage the Rebol assets including Rebol.org, and any other domains that RT no longer wish to maintain. I'd like this to extend to managing or help fund the new assets such as Rebol.info and Forum.rebol.info.
Yes, we'll need a charter and members, so if anyone has experience in these matters, let's discuss this one last time and actually get something done!
I'd like to be part of that discussion. I think we need to identify the people who want/need to be involved. Then we need agree on a list of actions that should be taken. And: Is this about Ren-C, or just about archiving online content and docs from RT?
It's about all of those things. There was a discussion on Altme Rebol4 world some years ago but like most of those discussions, nothing concrete evolved.
As for identifying the people who want to be involved, I think they need to find their own way here. Most of the people in the discussions before have moved on to red I think, or have been lost to the Rebol community and I doubt that they'd be interested in Ren-c yet. Anyway the main people involved in salvaging Rebol documentation include myself and @rgchris, and we're both here already.
Sounds good.
Just to be clear: We're not looking to preserve the old Rebol documentation/reference materials, right? Instead we want to collect these materials so that they can be appropriately revised for Ren-C.
Let's enumerate the list of actions/goals then. What needs to be done? (And, if you prefer, we can put together a To Do list in Trello for the few of us to split up the work.)
Ultimately we want to adapt them to R3 which is currently named Ren-c. But first step is to preserve them.
@rgchris and I have already captured the wiki on Rebol.org and the script library.
We can't grab any documentation from rebol.com as Carl says it's copyright of RT or himself but the wayback macine has those anyway.
Carl has offered the rebol.org domain to the community i.e. anyone organized enough to take it. I guess that could be us but it would be a huge job to reorganize all that content but I think it would be helpful if we to combine the r2 and new r3/renc documentation there explaining the differences for people looking to migrate. Red still also refers to r2 documentation.
I do have plans for backing up the script library—just need the will and cooperation to realise that*. The only important area of rebol.org I don't have contingency for is the Mailing List archive.
My thoughts are to break up areas of concern into separate subdomains and have a unifying homepage (for which the rebol.info homepage is my concept for how that might work and I believe the rebol.info domain sort of represents just now).
(*) though the notion of a script library seems a bit antiquated in the age of GitHub. I do wonder what role that might play now.
I'm in favor of archiving whatever useful Rebol 2 information that is available-- especially if it's easy (and thankfully this type of text tmunging is a forte for rebol). On the other hand, that stuff is quite dated, and my (mostly minor) concern about keeping that stuff available is that it's no longer reliable information and could easily become a source of misinformation. When writing Redbol and documenting it's already a bit of a chore to specify which interpreter and language branch it's intended for, I can only imagine the confusion it presents for newbies.
If Ren-C is to be positioned as a fully reformed Rebol (as opposed to Red, which in my mind is more of an evolution of Rebol 2.x-- shiny, buffed and rechromed, but an evolution nonetheless), then we likely need to reboot its documentation. Ren-C breaks with its Rebol past quite a bit, and I'm in favor of rewriting the documents to coincide with a major release. I'm also in favor of rewriting & reformatting docs to highlight Ren-C's key differentiators-- 1, the new standards for writing clean/concise code in Ren-C (i.e., just lang basics here), 2, Ren-C for data wrangling in a networked world, and 3, advanced parse and dialecting (binding will have to get covered in there too). I've been using https://twitter.github.io/typeahead.js/ for large static documentation sites at work, so I think it might be a good to connect a lot of the available docs with these menus (another thought: a Ren-C adaptation of DITA XML would form a good document/content management resuse framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Architecture)
What do you think? I support archiving the older material and examining it as a reference/starting point for writing Ren-C's documentation but I also think we need to clean much of the outdated or conflicting information out there. It just muddies the water for anyone trying to get started with Ren-C (or Red, for that matter). Also, what are your thoughts about creating a public-facing site for Ren-C, to showcase all of these materials? (Note: I see the name typed as Ren/C, which is may already be creating SEO issues.) Is now the right time to plan a new site for Ren-C, or are you thinking that github and other wikis are sufficient and this effort is mainly about consolidating/archiving the older Rebol materials?
(Edited for grammer & clarity)
We tend to use Ren-C instead of Ren/c because of those issues.
We already have the wiki, and the scripts on Github. But we don't have rights to Carl's documents so it's basically a black box rewrite if we don't wish to be accused of plaigirism.
There is the Rebol Wiki Book which many of us contributed to, but I thought it was a bit disorganised lacking a chief editor.
Ren-C is the only branch of the open source Rebol3 so I think we should present it as this if we take over Rebol.org. One of the points of taking over rebol.org is to position all of the documentation in its correct historical perspective, and point to the current alternatives.