From: "David A. Black" Date: 2008-08-06T23:43:32+09:00 Subject: Re: perl and the culture of libraries Hi -- On Wed, 6 Aug 2008, James Gray wrote: > On Aug 6, 2008, at 6:20 AM, Marc Heiler wrote: > >> I think we should talk to the rubyforge and RAA guys to encourage >> "better" behaviour. I am not stating it should be mandatory whatsoever, >> but rubyforge really is becoming the "ruby cpan" and it has a huge >> influence on various libraries and its shape and thus the overall >> ecosystem. > > I would say that github seems to have taken a huge bite out of the Rubyforge > and RAA circles of influence in a very short time. It also displays the > README on the main project master tree page. It has indeed. I think that at this point, it's unlikely to impossible that a system or standard is going to emerge that everyone follows, at least at the granularity of what the section headings in documentation are called and all that, and probably even at much coarser granularity. To some extent, having seen a million discussions about this, I have the feeling that if it were going to happen, it would have happened by now. Also, since something like github can arise and change the landscape, simply by being there, I believe it's fundamentally wrong to look at the whole thing as based on consensus. We can whip up a bunch of "standards" here and on various wikis, and that will have nothing to do with how things actually play out. So the real question, I would say, is: how can the various sites, philosophies, etc., interact with and connect to each other? I don't think that cherry-picking CPAN features is all that useful, since it doesn't address the bigger questions. (To which I have no answer, by the way. I think it's very possible that there is no set of steps A, B, ..., n, such that at the end of those steps, there will be any kind of uniformity or long-term interoperation. I don't even know what step A would be.) David -- Rails training from David A. Black and Ruby Power and Light: * Advancing With Rails August 18-21 Edison, NJ * Co-taught by D.A. Black and Erik Kastner See http://www.rubypal.com for details and updates!