Hi Sean,
Let me start to react from the end of your mail, where you have written:
| Note: I've also written a factoid bot that sits on #phpdoc that wasn't | linked above, it's tied into [PHP-DOC] and alerts us to commits, as | well. I hope I won't be shamed for that, too.
This seems to suggest that you interpreted the purpose of my rant to shame you and anybody else who are developing tools for phpdoc. That was absolutely against my intention.
What my aim is to:
- keep the good people in the group together - get out the most of the tools we already have - build on the tools we already have
Really, it's up to Dave to modify these tools for use in docweb. If he feels like it, he will, if not, he won't. The only reason they're on my server (at which phpdoc.info points) is because erigol.com was unfortunately offline for a few days/weeks and I offered to host Dave's tools. They're good tools, and we have no official place for them. What good would they do in CVS, currently?
You seem to suggest two things in your mail:
- the scripts on phpdoc.info were not supposed to be publicly announced - the scripts on phpdoc.info are not supposed to be open source
Well, this does not seem to be a positive direction. You say that docweb is not yet ready for real use, and you are not considering looking into it because of it's state. I say, that docweb will not be ready anytime, if people do not start adding their tools and trying out / engage in conversation about tools written by others. Docweb is supposed to host tools, documentation, etc. for phpdoc and for a whole bunch of php.net documentation projects. A lot of our tools might also work for pear / php-gtk, etc.
If you develop your own non-open-sourced tools, which you even try not to promote, people will start to develop their own tools, not knowing about the existing stuff. Now that we know Dave already developed a whole bunch of scripts, noone will start over from scratch, but we will wait for Dave to submit his work to the community, so others can improve on it, and that other doc projects can also benefit from the work. There is no point in starting over. The only workable way is to join forces.
The most depressing sentences are the last two above. Let me repeat, what you have written:
| They're good tools, and we have no official place for them. | What good would they do in CVS, currently?
Looking at the scripts at http://www.phpdoc.info/erigol/, they are all tools that generate output from the CVS checkouts behind, and so they can be setup anywhere, since their output can be regenerated anywhere. There is an official place for such scripts: docweb. What good they would have there?
- more people could help improve them - more documentation teams could be able to adopt them (without a need to start over from scratch) - since these scripts are supposed to sometime be placed in docweb anyway, developing with that back infrastructure (include files, layout, URL scheme etc) in mind, it would be easier later on (no need to port it to docweb)
If you don't help making docweb a reality, but rather just wait for it to become cool stuff, it will never become one.
Again, none of it is official. We (or at least I) don't expect it to be. The patch sites popped up out of necessity (how long were Nuno's patches available and lost in the archives before I spoke up about them? -- THERE WAS a central repository for livedocs patches: CVS, but access to it was restricted, hence the patch sites).
Livedocs cvs was not a central repository for patches, but for livedocs itself. I have not seen any committed patch files (only applied ones).
Goba
