Here's a few of my thoughts on the project:
Where do we host the project? Some options are:- SourceForge - well established, good network connections, pretty easy to use
- Perlmonks.org - Don't know how we'd do this in the current scheme. Nodes might get a little long and lengthy.
- Someone with website space - I have plenty of storage, but limited to 400MB of traffic per day. I don't know the legality of putting up a CVS server, however. I'd have to check with the sales/legal department there. I sure don't mind doing that, if the ISP doesn't (I use pair.com)
Project communications:- Perlmonks.org - Again, the node management system probably doesn't really lend itself to the kind of traffic we're talking about.
- Topica.com or OneList.com - I use topica.com for a couple of mailing lists that I'm on. They have minimal advertising (unlike OneList), and have both an e-mail and web interface
- Majordomo - I don't like majordomo. Does anyone?
In general:- I (and these are just my opinions, not gotta-be's!) would like to see a good positive attitude with regards to code critiquing. If someone writes codes they've signed up for, and it's questionable, it needs to be approached with a good positive attitude, not a body slam. Who ever signed up to write that section is presumably doing the best they know how. If there's a better way, it's not someone elses job to rip-and-write. The goal is educate people (remember, this is about education, and eliminating cargo-cult memes (to steal a phrase)), not alienate them.
- CPAN may be the home of well written code, but from a lot I've looked at, it's not the home of well documented code. On of the things that people should walk away from the project with is a sense of documentation that allows newbies to understand what's going on, but not have a 'War and Peace' sized text explaining a for-loop. Hopefully people of all skill levels will be participating, and it shouldn't take a trip to the bookstore to figure out why a 'map' was used, and why it's better than something else.
- Maintainability - Supertight Perl code is great, but if the next person who comes along that has even a slightest clue of what should be going can't maintain it, it's for naught. I know people here can write a single regexp that will yank every 50th word, swap them around in random order and produce a semi-coherent haiku. A single regexp 640 characters long is not maintainable. Many of the new Perl users only know how to manage simple regexps. We'd like to make them a little better at it, but I still don't expect them to have to be regexp geniuses to understand it.
Platforms: I think we're all in agreement at this stage that we want to be able to support Windows and Unix. It was pointed out that using mySQL or postGres may cause problems. I'd like to see the ability to support different databases, from simple CSVs to Oracle, so you can use what you have. Along similiar lines, we have to decide on the interface. Tk/Gtk? Built in webserver (my favorite)? Runs under the OS webserver (bad idea)?
Unless we agree on an environment in the next few days, I'm going to setup a link on my webpage to a summary of what we're looking at. If we go ahead with a SourceForge page, we'll put it there. Too many people are starting to offer good ideas that I don't want to see lost. It's all valid input, and part of the project specification documents (which should all be available in PDF, too. Right?)
Typing in this little box is really starting to make me lose my train of thought, so I'll leave it at that for now.
--Chris
By the way, please don't waste your votes on the nodes in this project. XP isn't the goal.
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