First, I want to say thanks for your contributions to the site. Your patches are much appreciated.

There are a few reasons I think that puting the code in the database is a bad idea, and I speak from experience on this, having started my serious programmimg career with a system that stored all code in a database. Principally, there are lots of great tools for working with files (CVS, grep, diff, emacs, rsync, etc.) and all of them have to be reinvented when the code is in the database instead. At the very least, you need something to import/export the code from the database. Writing test scripts becomes much more difficult. Getting a working copy of the current code becomes a chore.

You mention the difficulty of updating. This is not a hard problem to solve. Simply using Apache::Reload will avoid having to restart the server. However, you'll shred your copy-on-write shared memory this way, which must already be happening with the current system. That hurts the scalability of the site, since it lowers the number of processes you can run without going into swap.

Keeping code in CVS (or Subversion or whatever) is the expected standard, and there's a good reason for it. It allows you to do things like branches, which are not possible with a simple revision system. It also allows people who are familiar with other open source projects to get started quickly. Creating RCS-like functionality in PM itself is not a substitute for the full power of source control. I also don't really buy into the idea of this being more object-oriented. Looking at the node you linked to, I see no POD, no easy way to write a test script, no easy way to run perltidy on it, no way to perldoc it if there was POD, etc.

The bottom line is that putting all the code in the database is non-standard and unnecessary. It makes things much harder for new people who are familiar with other open source projects and are interested in getting involved with PM. It obviously has not prevented work from going on, but I consider it a clear negative, and I suspect many others would agree with me.

In reply to Re^5: Total speculation? by perrin
in thread Total speculation? by BrowserUk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.