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That is mostly undecided; but however it turns out, it will largely be the work of volunteers.

Since things that go into the standard library reflect on the reputation of AutoHotkey (not to mention the size of the installer), I think there should be a fairly high quality standard -- yet nothing too bureaucratic.

Currently there is no plan for anything like that. However, namespaces might get considered someday.

There used to be a post here from someone about setting up a common account on AutoHotkey.net for stdlib authors. It also talked about Natural Docs and the possibility of automatically checking for stdlib updates via script or some built-in feature.

The post vanished after I changed the poll in this topic to expire in 1 day. I'm not sure if there's a glitch in the forum, or whether the author of the post deleted/moved it. Anyway, whoever posted it can feel free to repost it if they want.

Yeah that was me. I deleted it b/c I was going to start a new thread, but I got sidetracked and never got the chance to resubmit it.

But yeah, that was the idea. I figured it would be a decent idea to give each function's author his/her own directory on this .net account, so the files could be password protected. I can't really think of a way other than that to have some type of security involved, b/c I would assume that we wouldn't want just anybody:

a. accessing the stdlib directory
b. accessing specific files (other than the author of that function)

That's all I got at the moment. I'd definitely like to hear suggestions, or maybe somebody has an even better idea.

I have an SVN server set up, and we can partition out accounts for everything, but I just had a better idea - make a seperate Sourceforge.net project for the library, and whomever wants to develop can sign up.

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I have a forum that I had originally set up for this purpose that I could reactivate if a few people are interested. Alternately, maybe Chris could setup a separate forum here ( ) for potential stdlib files so that each submission could have its' own thread, discussion, space for modifications, etc... that is not potentially misplaced and blended in with all the other misc. posts in other categories, and to save people having to register at a second forum.

I may not know enough about this approach to really contribute a whole lot of ideas, but I have some thoughts\questions. What I had in mind would be to have all the functions that were "stdlib worthy" in one common area, possibly accessible via ftp or urldownloadtofile. Is that possible with this approach? Or would there be a different way of accessing? Also, would there be a way of restricting access to the modification of files? Say, restrict access to only allow the function developer access to modify the file? Again, I don't think I know enough about this subject, I'm just curious if all of that is possible with this approach.

Or are you thinking that a developer would post his/her function into the stdlib forum, then a user could choose to download it or not?
In my mind when I think of the standard library, i think of a library containing functions common to all users of ahk. Everyone's stdlib would contain those functions and if a change was made to any of them, then a script could be set up to recognize that change, and download the appropriate updated functions. I thought about seeing if the update functionality could be offered internally, but that probably wouldn't be the best solution.

Again, these are probably all stupid questions/statements that everybody already knows the answer to, but I'm trying to understand something I'm mostly unfamiliar with.

Good questions . I had something slightly different in mind that might or might not be the best way to go (opinions welcome - maybe better moved to a new topic? ).

Since the standard library could potentially be distributed with AutoHotkey and since it would then be used by a large number of people, I was thinking that it might be necessary to screen potential functions (to a certain extent) before they are inlcuded. I would imagine that Chris would likely want to have the final say on what would get added to the Standard Library.

A forum could potentially be used for proposing/posting new functions to be added. A new topic could be created with a poll for each new function/file (might not only contain functions) to be added. Users could then vote on whether they like the idea of adding the proposed functionality to the standard library. If the vote seems to be in favour of adding the functionality and if the format, documentation, naming, variable usage (globals if any) seems acceptable then the official download could be updated with the new functionality. This download could be made available separately for people who want the latest version without having to wait for the next AutoHotkey release (sounds like a good idea to me ). A person or small group of people could then be responsible for keeping the download up to date.

Hey, that sounds like a good idea to me. The only thing I could add to it would be some type of versioning standard, that way a script could detect updates and automatically download them, b/c I don't want to have to check to keep my lib up-to-date. That could be where enguneer's suggestion comes into play. But, if you don't know about it, then what are you missing? Ignorance is bliss.

At the moment, I don't want a new forum for stdlib; but maybe someday if/when its benefits become clear. I think the Scripts/Functions forum is enough for now.

As for the other ideas: I don't wish to work on them personally because I'd like to put what little time I have toward the core features of AutoHotkey. However, anyone can feel free to pursue them by themselves or in cooperation with others.