Shlomi Fish wrote:
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":
[http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s10.html]
[Shlomi's experiences using different community channels]
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.
I'd rather look at these metrics as a way of encouraging developers to think
about issues around community sustainment. That way, we can use "the game" as a
tool for software improvement in addition to improving the codebase. Which
specific types of channels one should get points for may warrant discussion,
but if our goal is the improvement of the software, we should at least
encourage a mininmum number of ways to reach the users and developers of a
software project.
I would suggest giving a point for explicitly (and in a consistently
machine-readable manner) stating the project's...
* primary public bugtracker (frontpage URL) in use by it's users and developers
* main public mailing list (subscription URL) in use by it's users and
developers
* publically searchable archive of the mailing list (search page URL)
* publically readable code repository (e.g. to a CVSWeb or SVN::Web frontpage
URL)
"Instant" communication channels like IRC and IM can of course be useful, but
since the chat logs usually aren't stored and indexed publically, their lon
term usefulness for the community are somewhat limited.
One could of course say distros that don't state ANY contact information or
community support channels could be "penalized", but I'd guess these developers
probably don't care enough about their software or "the game" to feel much
penalty from losing those points.
The rest of us ("the CPAN/Perl community") can still get all the good stuff, in
addition to some hints on which projects one shouldn't expect any improvements
or support. :)
- Salve
--
Salve J. Nilsen <salvejn at met dot no> / Systems Developer
Norwegian Meteorological Institute http://met.no/
Information Technology Department / Section for Development
