All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

nms Recommended by Matt Wright

pudge on 2002-05-21T20:00:55

davorg writes "Matt Wright has given the MSA web site a major redesign. He's included a page about nms. Here are a couple of extracts.

While the free code found at my web site has not evolved much in recent years, the general programming practices and standards of CGI programs have. nms is an attempt by very active programmers in the Perl community to bring the quality of code for these types of programs up to date and eliminate some of the bad programming practices and bugs found in the existing Matt's Script Archive code.
I would highly recommend downloading the nms versions if you wish to learn CGI programming. The code you find at Matt's Script Archive is not representative of how even I would code these days.

I call that a good result :)"

Good start, but not enough IMO!

KM on 2002-05-21T20:14:10

This is certainly a good start.. but he is still distributing his scripts from his front page with absolutely no warning whatsoever. I have personally asked him a few times to do that, and he hasn't, and still hasn't. The link to nms is toward the bottom, where many newbies may never get to. He should have a link or warning at the top of the page, and remove his scripts all together.

Re:Good start, but not enough IMO!

davorg on 2002-05-21T20:38:47

It's true that the nms information isn't very obvious on Matt's site. Also note that he hosts all of the nms scripts locally and nowhere does he link to the real nms site.

He does, however, provide links to download the equivalent nms script on all of his script download pages.

To my mind, the biggest advantage to us is that when we get in a debate over the relative merits of nms and MSA (as we saw on the beginners-cgi list recently) we can now point at Matt's own comments to support our point of view.

No, it's far from a perfect solution. But I do see this as a major step in the right direction.

Re:Good start, but not enough IMO!

KM on 2002-05-22T00:03:56

I agree, it is a good step forward on a flight of stairs :) Someone should mirror his site before he decides to retract it all ;)

Not sure if I like how he is hosting the nms scripts locally (unless he syncs with the nms scripts, which I would highly doubt). If a hole or issue is found and fixed, or the nms scripts are simply updated... how will the people at his site know? We all know he can't even maintain his own scripts, how will he maintain the downloads of the nms ones? Will he give version numbers of nms scripts, once the nms files have version numbers (hint hint :)? I doubt it.

As you say, he doesn't link to the nms site, so people can't even go there directly. I guess the Londom.pm could get slick and redirect to the nms site when the referer is from his site (since he links to London.pm).

So, a good step... but I wonder if he will make any more.

Re:Good start, but not enough IMO!

Smylers on 2002-05-27T13:03:06

nowhere does he link to the real nms site

But then nor does this use Perl article ... there's a “-cgi” forgotten from the domain; it should be nms-cgi.sf.net.

Smylers

very cool

ask on 2002-05-22T12:44:01

remember that he didn't have to do that. I think it's very cool. At least in my book he is scoring major points for this.

Re:very cool

KM on 2002-05-22T22:17:31

He scored a point with me, but nothing major. Maybe I'm just not as impressed as others are mainly because of the reasons I said in my other comment(s). When your dog craps on the floor, you can cover it with a shoebox, but there is still crap under it.

That reminds me.. I should go clean that up...