I'm doing research for a possible startup where I'm writing a tool (in Nim) for supporting library repos. I also have a few libraries up on nimble.directory.
So, I figured this forum might be a apt place to ask some open-ended research questions. If it is inappropriate, please let me know.
One of the purposes of an open-source library is for other people to use it. The other purpose is also for contributors to help develop it. And while the "users group" and "contributors group" definitely overlap, there are pretty much always more users than contributors.
That makes sense. Though I help out regularly with about a dozen libraries, I also "only use" hundreds of other libraries.
(Actually, since my main OS is an Ubuntu derivative, I'm probably using many thousands of other libraries indirectly every day.)
For the libraries where I'm an active contributor, one of the challenges of users is they often have questions. For a little-used library, the occasional "tech support" question thrown into GitHub Issues is no big deal and easily answered. But for a popular library or project, this can be more problematic.
I'd love to hear peoples opinions and solutions for the following.
(Nim itself, has this forum to help out, of course...)
They usually have their custom community tools, forums, blogs plus social media, I like a lot regarding Nim community the Telegram group, there is always veterans there to answer your doubts in real time
I think the biggest problem is the duplication of questions and responses
Very often
As I expressed above, I love the way I can get real time help in Nim groups from veteran people. It could be awesome to be able to have a hierarchy depending on experience level of users, and be able to target my question to the appropriate users
I use a Nim-decimal library of IBM origin ... it is licensed apache, is that why we do not see it in the directory "directorie" ???? is a fundamental lib to make treatment in Business Management I came there by chance, I was almost to tell me to do my own lib, and as I'm still too new in "Nim" .... plus it was one points that made me back for my commitment .... all that to bring water to the mill .... Help ???? why do we leave lib who with errors or not maintained and out of use ..... is there a security service for packegins, I have not seen this point addressed in the documentation.
Thank you sorry my english
Nim-decimal is my package, I wrote it while looking for bigint alternatives. The wrapper was done but ended up not being used as I wrote stint instead as we didn't need a generic bigint (nor a "bigfloat" library).
It's open-source because all the code we produce at Status is open-source.
Nevertheless we strive for high-quality code as well and nim-decimal has very few tests compared to our other libraries which includes unittests, property-based/statistical testing, reference implementation testing, we're also starting to use fuzzing and all our tests are done on multiple hardware: Linux, Mac, 32/64-bit Windows (and coming soon ARM).
If someone finds the wrapper useful and want to adopt, maintain it and bring it to a state good enough to promote it on nimble directory, feel free, I don't see an issue transferring the repo to them.