Shlomi Fish wrote:
On Monday 24 July 2006 16:23, Salve J Nilsen wrote:
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...
[bugtracker]
[public mailing list]
[...and it's searchable archive]
* publically readable code repository (e.g. to a CVSWeb or SVN::Web
frontpage URL)
Hmmmm... would a standard Subversion HTTP/S tree be enough?
Sure, main the purpose of such a resource (for the general community at least)
would be to allow easy access to the current source code to allow relevant bug
reporting and patch creation. The standard SVN web service is more than good
enough for this purpose, IMO. :)
"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.
True, but I solved many problems using IRC or at least got a lot of help.
I love using IRC too, and as a way to get "instantaneously" in touch with devs
and users, I think it's great. Therefore, I think it's very cool when the devs
of some project say they can be reached through some IRC channel. But is IRC a
community feature we feel is important/necessary enough to give a point for in
"the game"?
I think IRC is extremely convenient and definitely worth a point, but I also
think that having a code repository, a bugtracker and a mailing list with a
searchable archive is MUCH more useful for a project. Is there a way to make
such a distinction in "the game"?
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. :)
Yes.
I daresay that sometimes a simple forward or developer email address is
enough as a contact address. Recently I encountered some people in Israel
(relatively new to the Internet scene) who seem to dislike mailing lists and
prefer web forums and other mediums. Some of them even complained that some
relatively low volume mailing lists were high volume, while in fact they
were less than p5p and perl6-language, and much less than BugTraq or the
Linux Kernel Mailing List.
Heh... If such users manage to create a web forum for a project, all kudos to
them! Pointing out the existence of a webforum in the META.yml file would of
course be useful when that's the main channel for discussion.
There is some software for multiplexing between a web forum, a newsgroup, a
mailing list and an RSS feed, which could be useful.
Gmane is such a tool, and I've talked with Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen (the
website's main developer) about the possibility of making it into a publically
available tool. Although he appreciated the idea he said that the software
was pretty much custom made and too complex (not "packagable enough") to be
made into something anyone can install for their community. :-(
But we need to consider whether we also want a forum (a la Gabor's
http://www.cpanforum.com/ ) as well. I wonder if there's anyway I can become
automatically subscribed to all the distributions I've ever maintained on
cpanforum.com? That would be cool. Gabor, can you shed some light on this
issue?
Hehe, that would be cool. Having a META.yml field where the author can state
she's subscribing to the distribution's CPAN forum, at which some part of the
forum software can update it's subscription lists based on this information. :)
e.g. author_subscribes_to_cpanforum: yes
That would be neat! :)
- Salve, dreaming of blue skies again. :-P
--
Salve J. Nilsen <salvejn at met dot no> / Systems Developer
Norwegian Meteorological Institute http://met.no/
Information Technology Department / Section for Development
