continuation of <this discussion>

# library-development

[Piotr Krzemiński]

continuation of this discussion

[Piotr Krzemiński]

wiki or not, it’s an implementation detail. Also weird to discuss one or more lists, one cannot plan for having X decentralized lists - it happens naturally, as a result of different factors (e.g. existing lists having some problems/missing features)

to me, the questions are now:
• what concrete issues (use cases) would the list solve? helping funding a project is one, finding a solution to a given problem (like implementing a CLI) is another interesting case
• who would own it? Is there a chance for JetBrains to own it? how to ensure that the list is properly maintained and up-to-date?

[Big Chungus]

As @mcpiroman mentioned https://kamp.petuska.dev is not very useful for discoverability at the moment (even though it does have a full list of kotlin libraries on the mavenCentral). I've initially written it as a way for myself to check platforms support of a known library since very few list out supported platforms clearly in their readmes. Thus the rushed UI and terrible search feature.

I'd be happy to discuss ideas how we could make use of that index to improve discoverability and make it more useful in general. Im planning to implement "library ownership" feature that would let you sign in via gitlab/github and claim ownership of your libraries in the index. After that we could use that to allow people to add more metadata to the index about their libraries like tags, proper descriptions, links and maybe mark it with "help/donation needed".

On the other hand, there could be some general SSO for library consumers to allow voting for their favourite libraries to rank them that way too.

Those are just some thoughts off the top of my head, but I'm happy to discuss this more if anyone thinks it'd be useful.

[Big Chungus]

There could also be different "watchlists" too like "Maintainers Wanted", "Looking for a new Owner", etc...

[Big Chungus]

Of course ideally we'd have all that on official channels like kotlinlang.org

[Piotr Krzemiński]

I like the ideas! even if it remains community-owned, it has great potential to solve the mentioned problems

[Piotr Krzemiński]

@Big Chungus are you open to contributions? does the state of the project allow it? how about listing the mentioned ideas in the issues in the repo?

[Big Chungus]

But as long as it's centralised and not moderated by a single entity (i.e. library owners and consumers decide the "importance", not some random guy in a closet) a 3p website would be nice too

[Big Chungus]

I was quite preocupied with my other projects up until recently so sadly it was sitting idle on the shelf so far. I'm looking to getting back on it now though, so to preserve ideas I'd appreciate people raising feature requests/ideas on the repo petuska.dev/kamp/issues.

I'm happy to accept and help with contributions to all of my OSS projects, however kamp is in the middle of rewrite/restructuring at the moment, so it'd probably be best to hold off contributions until the end of December at least until I'm done with that.

[Piotr Krzemiński]

thanks, I’ll create issues in the repo for the ideas

[Big Chungus]

Great, I'll ping back here when it's ready for contributions.

[Piotr Krzemiński]

if you’re planning to do a rewrite, including UX improvements, I encourage you to engage us (the community) so that we iterate on how it could work together 🙂 some mocks can be a good start, or enumerating issues present in the current version

[Big Chungus]

I'm replacing underlying frameworks at first (fritz2 -> CfW/KMDC). Happy to do a followup UX rewrite after that and involve people then (since it'd be easier to discuss than cross-framework).

[Big Chungus]

But for now I've created this in case anyone has some early thoughts.

[mcpiroman]

So are we converging on KAMP? Right now https://kotlin.link is closer at least to my expectations, although certainly it would be nice to combine it with the backend of KAMP, probably also make a tab listing all libraries with as it is now in KAMP.

[mcpiroman]

And in the end, considering the ideas we have, it will just end up being yet another side (no matter where published) anyway.

[Big Chungus]

Not necessarily. I'm happy to deprecate kamp frontend and convert it into a data-source for kotlin.link.

Main reason why I've started kamp even though kotlin.link existed was the fact that it was fully human-curated and non-exhaustive.

[mcpiroman]

Yup, something like that.

[Big Chungus]

The main idea here I think is to have some central place that's both auto-indexed (i.e. exhaustive) and human-curated/maintained.

[Big Chungus]

So your underlying data is refreshed automatically, yet you still have an option to enhance it with manual input from both, authors and consumers (not the site developer itself).

[Big Chungus]

I quite like how https://index.scala-lang.org/ does it.

[Big Chungus]

A lot of auto-fetched content, but it is flexible enough to let owners enhance it further.

[Piotr Krzemiński]

💡 we can consider asking JetBrains for hosting such index and periodically reviewing it form their perspective, while it could be created by the community. This way it has better discoverability and looks official, like Scala’s. This is of course not that simple (politics, how would JB exactly review it and so on), but worth trying

[Big Chungus]

If we can agree that they only review the general theming/layout/branding while leaving the source data alone and up to each individual library owners it should be fine.

[Big Chungus]

Or to make it easier to get that "official-like" recognition, we could just make the frontend decent enough so that we could ask it to be featured on the kotlinlang home page somewhere at the bottom. Or even in he docs at the getting started section so that people just starting their kotlin journey would be made aware.

[Big Chungus]

Anyways, looks like a channel for general discussions around kamp might be useful - #kodex (kamp 2.0 will get renamed to kodex to avoid name clash with TouchLab's KaMP Kit)