Re: Anyone on this list?

[Chris <chris@starforge.co.uk>]

#29-Oct-02# Message from *Francesco Orsenigo, Xarvh Project*:
Hi Xarvh Project,

> Maybe you'll be surprised but: I know nothing about bash scripting,
> makefiles, debug, cvs (to download pingus i just copyied and pasted the
> commands...) If someone does not notice it, how can i know that i must
> insert a file named `INSTALL` and not `COMPILE`? I had gladly liked to put
> a configure script and makefile if i could....

SEUL has an excellent tutorial on how to use autoconf/automake/libtool:

http://seul.org/docs/autotut/

It's quite a long read, but you'll be surprised how easy it actually is once
you've tried it out on some small programs.

>> Pack the news on the homepage on a different page, currently one has
>> to scroll the page down completly to find some generic game info.
> I learned just the few HTML necessary to write that site... I must rewrite
> it (but it needs time! is better using it for programming or for
> publishing?)

Depends on your priorities. If you want people to use your programs you need
to make it easy for them to use and you need to make them want to try your
stuff - a website is the advertising for your program and nothing puts people 
off something faster than a page that isn't easy to navigate or doesn't look 
good. In general the effort spent on making a good site IS worth it - even 
if it doesn't pay off for one project, the skills and experience WILL come 
in handy sooner or later. Even if you don't want to invest the time in web
design, if you're hosted on somewhere that provides a mysql database and php
then you could just use phpNuke - it's worth paying for decent hosting to
get these anyway (every website I've worked on ends up needing perl, php 
and at least one mysql database sooner or later - if you want your own
online bug tracking software rather than sourceforge's then you'll need at 
least perl/mysql anyway) and nuke provides all the features you seem to 
need while also looking good and being easy to navigate.

Chris
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