[gurps] Building a VehicleML

[Onno Meyer]

> 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.

As of right now, I have no problem with sharing the XML format
and XSLTs. (It touches my real-life work, and if I 'crib' from 
there I might have to reconsider.) 

The data itself is another question. For the proof-of-concept 
I'm using only my vehicles, and those will go to sourceforge 
as soon as I get into the project (see separate mail), but 
for the bulk I'll have to think about it.