An open system in one in which a user with a little familiarity with programming can start playing right away, and, within a few minutes, he should be able to access most documentation, browse the source code, recompile things, single-step through programs, etc, etc, and understand how the system, as it stands now, was written, and how he can add his own pieces to it.
No system of today is this open, but Linux can come very close to it when seen the right way. If your .emacs has, like mine, definitions for commands like eev and for functions like find-node and find-...file then you can mix text, things to be run by the shell, Emacs Lisp code (generally used to make hyperlinks) and zillions of other things into plain text files, which are what I call E-scripts. For example,
rm -Rv /usr/src/tcl7.6-7.6p2/ cd /usr/src/ dpkg-source -sn -x /big/slinks2/dists/slink/main/source/libs/tcl7.6_7.6p2-7.dsc cd /usr/src/tcl7.6-7.6p2/ debian/rules binary |& tee odrb # (code-c-d "tcl7" "/usr/src/tcl7.6-7.6p2/") # (find-tcl7file "odrb") # (find-tcl7file "generic/tclParse.c") # (find-tcl7file "generic/tclInt.h" "ParseValue") # (find-tcl7file "tests/parse.test")is a chunk of shell commands, which can be executed by marking them as a block in emacs, then running
M-x eev, then running ee in a zsh command line; these shell commands are followed by comments that are in fact Emacs Lisp expressions, and each of them can be executed by placing the cursor after it and typing C-x C-e. See ....
...so what happens with E-scripts is that the record of what you've done becomes, organically, your own documentation on what you know how to do; it can be interspersed with all sorts of comments, including pointers to interesting things you've found. You can record partial successes, you can add more comments to the parts you like more, and things are gathered in a few files instead of in a zillion of scripts whose names will be forgotten; and it's easy to execute only a part of a block of code, and to support other types of code besides zsh.
Well, that was enough sales-babble. If the idea appeals to you please start with what I've done (drop me a line if possible!) and continue your way. As every Forth programmer knows, "standards are wonderful, everybody should have one".
Please send comments and more links!!! :-)
Have fun!
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