[gurps] Building a VehicleML

[Bira]

Onno, I'm sorry for suddenly invading the conversation. I think your
project is interesting, and I would like to state my opinion on the
three options you presented earlier. It's your project, in the end,
obviously, and you're free to handle it however you want. Please don't
take this message as anything more than a handful of humble
suggestions :).

I think at least some of the products of this project would benefit
from being somewhere publicly accessible. The way I see it, there are
two kinds of audience the project benefits - those who want to do
something with it development-wise, and those who just want to look at
the end result (be it PDFs or HTML pages). Would-be developers might
be interested in contributing to the format itself, using it to
publish their own vehicles, or building conversion tools. All they
would really need "revealed" is the format definition and maybe a few
sample vehicles. It would make it easier for them to contribute, and
you wouldn't have to do all the work yourself.

Another advantage of putting the definitions and/or code up on a
public repository like sourceforge or github, though, is that if
someone wants to perform a change you don't agree with, they could
fork the repository (i.e, start their own project with the original's
code as a base). Forking is actually healthy as long as it's not done
out of spite, and both maintainers are willing to share future changes
with each other when it makes sense to do so.

The people who just want pretty vehicle PDFs would be perfectly happy
with just having those published, without having to look at the source
files. So you could go that way with the vehicles created by other
people, or those you don't want to release as raw XML.



-- 
Bira
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