On Wednesday 19 July 2006 17:08, Salve J Nilsen wrote: > Just a wild thought... > > Would it be useful to check for references to community support channels > like mailing lists, IRC channels, public bug trackers and official web > pages? >
Interesting idea. One thing I should probably note is that ESR has this recommendation in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar": <<<<<< It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style [IN]. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't try it. I didn't either. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with. When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future. http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s10.html >>>>>> I can attest from my experience that my most successful projects started from some code I wrote for myself, for some reason or another, and then finalised and released to the public. I usually didn't start a mailing list right away for them, and instead just publicised them on Freshmeat and collected the mails I received regarding them in my inbox, until there was enough to form a mailing list. Some of them still don't have a mailing list. In regards to IRC channels: I tend to avoid starting one IRC channel for every limited-scope Perl module I put on the CPAN. There are enough channels I'm trying to participate on Freenode as it is, and usually cannot concentrate on one or two channels at a time. I feel that such modules should be discussed on channels of larger scope like #perl. (Albeit larger scale projects such as POE, Catalyst/Jifty/etc. Perl-QA, etc. may justify their own channels). For example, LeoNerd and I have coordinated the development of Error.pm on #perl. Note that #perlcafe (on Freenode) is intended as #perl's chat channel, where one can also "banish" discussions that tend to flood #perl and have too little interest on the other #perl participants and lurkers. Another note is that I'm often not on the IRC on my waking hours, because I'm finding it too distracting and addictive. People can always reach me on IM or on Email: http://www.shlomifish.org/me/contact-me/ What did I want to say? Yes, often the scope or maturity of the module does not justify a special "community" support channels. So I'm not sure whether penalising CPAN distros for not having this information is a good idea. But I'll have to think about it some more. Regards, Shlomi Fish --------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/ Chuck Norris wrote a complete Perl 6 implementation in a day but then destroyed all evidence with his bare hands, so no one will know his secrets.
