Re^2: Anyone doing anything about questions/answers at PM?

Up to a point, Lord Copper. As a Perl newbie, it's very difficult for me to know whether to put a question in SoPW or CQ&A. CQ&A is also very unstructured. What I would like to see is CQ&A in more of a tree form. To give an example, there are 14 entries in GUI programming, in no apparent order. It would be more helpful to me to have them categorised further into Tk, MessWare etc., although I accept that with only 14 it's probably redundant. However, there are lots of posts in SoPW that never seem to make it into CQ&A. I suspect that the amount of work involved is the main issue.

So, let me make a modest proposal. Someone with the time and knowledge enables CQ&A to operate on a tree basis, and creates a "Spreadsheets" top level category. Provided that the maintenance tools aren't too complicated, I hereby volunteer to populate and maintain links to spreadsheet and Perl related content. I say "links", because I don't see any great disadvantage to driving everything internal with node pointers, regardless of where the original node appeared. And yes, I would - unless I was instructed not to - link to nodes that are already in the tutorials section.

Obviously, the first question must be: is my proposal possible? The second: what tools are (or can be made) available? Oh yes, and would anyone else be prepared to maintain other categories? This last isn't essential, although I would prefer not to be a lone voice in the wilderness.

The reason I'm talking about spreadsheets rather than anything else is that I do know my way around them quite well, even if I don't know much Perl. I've also started to build up a library of links for my own use, and formalising the process would not be too much like work.

Let the flames commence!

Regards,

John Davies

Comment on Re^2: Anyone doing anything about questions/answers at PM?

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Re^3: Anyone doing anything about questions/answers at PM? by polettix (Vicar) on May 30, 2005 at 16:11 UTC
Well Mr. Salter, but this goes a bit beyond the OP. When I read it, I immediately thought about Categorized Questions and Answers and the Perl Cookbook, which share a similar structure IMHO. I don't believe much in deep tree structures, they tend to confuse and to hide stuff. I prefer http://search.cpan.org much more than http://www.cpan.org, to make an example; in a deep structure you could end up putting the solution to a more general problem inside a particular leaf which could match poorly the needs of others. Flavio (perl -e 'print(scalar(reverse("\nti.xittelop\@oivalf")))') Don't fool yourself.	[reply]
Re^4: Anyone doing anything about questions/answers at PM? by davies (Monsignor) on May 30, 2005 at 19:34 UTC
Like you, when the OP asked about organising the Q&As, I thought about CQ&A. However, as I indicated, I've never found it that useful because it contains so few posts. For example, I spent about a quarter of an hour at one point looking through it for anything on spreadsheets, but without success. I'm too new to Perl to have met the cookbook, so I can't sensibly comment on it. I agree with you totally about deep trees. Looking at the ActiveState presentation of the Perl docs on my machine, I think the tree of the docs reaches a maximum depth of 4, and that only rarely. I certainly would have no conceptual problem with a limit on the depth, although as soon as you set a limit, soneone wil find a good reason to exceed it! I also agree with planetscape - on two counts. One is that if no-one else is doing it, the person who wants a change should be prepared to put some work in. The second is that doing the whole thing would be a huge amount of work. It would also be beyond my abilities even if I had the time. So my proposal was made in the hope of breaking it down into manageable jobs, one of which I have the knowledge to do. PM has saved me a lot of time, and I don't yet have the knowledge to give unto others as has been given unto me, except in a few narrow areas. I suspect that our ideas on this aren't too different. BTW, I recently finished reading "At War with Waugh", Bill Deedes's book about his coverage of the Abyssinian conflict. Since you picked up my literary gauntlet, it's a book you might enjoy. Of course, you might have read it already... Regards, John Davies	[reply]