On Wed, 2012-05-23 at 20:58 +0200, Danny B. wrote:
I advocate for "Shared" (or something even better, if we'll find), since "Public" are most of tools that are on Toolserver...
My point in suggesting "public" and "private" was to emphasize that the latter kind (which, indeed, currently make up the overwhelming majority, even if we'd like that to change) really do reside on the owner's private account, are maintained only by the owner and only survive as long as the owner keeps maintaining them (or at least keeps renewing their account). If the owner is run over by a bus, bye bye tool.
Ideally, I (and I assume others here) would like to see the "public" / "shared" / "multi-maintainer" tools to gradually become the default, unmarked case when someone speaks of a "Toolserver tool", with private tools becoming the ones that need a special qualifier. But this won't happen immediately, so for some time we're going to have to keep using qualifiers for both types of tools.
In this ideal world, most private tools would indeed be only private one-off tasks and development prototypes. Ultimately, I'd like to see tool authors routinely move any of their tools that seem useful to more than one person to a public account as soon as they're past the "alpha-testing" stage. But again, that will take some work, both in changing attitudes and in actually making the process easy enough for that to be practical.
Yeah, I guess I should start leading by example here. Now how did the current process for setting up an MMP, *ahem*, public tool go again...