Or entirely new material could be built and edited ad hoc. But first let me ask for your time in advance, as this is a somewhat lengthy post.
Obviously besides legal entanglement there is also the problem of everyone posting links to cpan, i.e. you would need to be online to use it unless another subset of a cpan snapshot was included.
The real question is, what is the minimum exciting, useful, practical, and saleable content requirement for such a project? It is a real world publishing question based on trying to make something people want, by people who want to make it. Hopefully something very monklike, stunning, and easy to make.. although I think you'll find I've skipped the easy part and maybe one or two of the others in my product idea at the end of this post. It just doesn't have to be the sum total of all bytes in the PM http root.
And I think the corollary to this question is, it doesn't have to be a CD, that's just a very effective way to get a customer to part with cash. It could be some service run by a finite number of monks, for example mentoring is one with real potential. Maybe something like a relatively small set of articles and code.
Real world expertise and a fun, exploratory approach to programming/problem solving seem to be something which could be conveyed through such articles, and it would make sense to make installments. Perhaps PM could solicit articles from some key people, reimbursing them with a percentage of the proceeds after costs. I'm thinking of interesting discussions like the use DBIx/DBI is fine articles on perl.com earlier this year, or merlyn's work, or maybe something totally different.
One thing that might be quite interesting to do is a "Distillation" of the site which attempts to provide encyclopedic answers to all the questions that people always search for. It would be like manufacturing a good Cognac, which through proper exercise of critical analysis, passion, and humor, might give us a grand cru of immense proportions. Or maybe it's more like those Belgian monks who as part of their duties brew some pretty wild beer! (I'm talking about Chimay, Mort Subite, and any number of others here, each monastery has its own intense bouquet of flavor, texture, and aroma).
I mean you don't necessarily want to publish a new CD every couple of weeks, right? Drinking this up you drink our essence.. and maybe we'll get more would-be monk vintners from kids who get this for Christmas. It would be highly informative but could have related threads and/or chat in the margins (a pdf? a book? a Tk thing? Maybe it's a BDB file and we end up with a zillion clients?! Maybe we publish a chapter for free with O'Reilly??) and it could be lots of fun. Here's an initial stab at it.
I don't know how detailed the server logs are to date, but it is likely that we could build (or are already building) click paths per user session through the site. If I look something up in the supersearch I might get ten or a hundred results. But it is likely that so long as I stay inside PM, the last ones on which I click will be most useful. Also many good things get said in Chatterbox and disappear into the aether (maybe we should keep it that way but that's another story). We could save those nuggets. And maybe when a monk is struck by a divine inspiration and realizes something really pithy or scatalogical has been posted in the course of our normal threads, the monk could quickly jot a note down in a special Distillation node which would let the monk indicate node number, topic, why it's insanely great, and the section of the encyclopedia (selected from a popup) to which it might go.
A resource which gave the best possible answers (not as a discussion thread, but a paraphrased, well written encylopedia article, would be 1) legal, and 2) immensely useful. Perhaps if you buy a CD and install it on your computer, you can any time request a diff on the archive to update it. Building such a resource would not be a trivial task, although it could certainly be done in parallel with a limited number of editors. The software for this kind of thing already exists (maybe even in everything2?) as dmoz, faq-o-matic, wiki, and papa cpan will attest. I think this kind of a process could give its progenitors both immediate and lasting satisfaction, it could generate something really useful and saleable, the Distillation would promote Perl and related skills, and would be something genuinely in and of the PM community. I'm not stuck on what it's called, I just think that something uniquely monkish and fun is all that we can and must do for our vroom and our fellow Perl-lovers! Let us hasten to the fields! Amen.
In reply to Re: Perl Monks Cdrom Distribution
by mattr
in thread Perl Monks Cdrom Distribution
by bladx
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