NMS Project Needs Help

Simon on 2004-10-05T15:05:00

davorg writes "The nms project is a project that provides drop-in replacements for the CGI programs provided by Matt's Script Archive. The idea is to provide users with secure and well-written alternatives to Matt Wright's scripts. Even Matt recommends them. But the project is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. We have a large number of users which is growing daily. And although we makes the programs as easy to install and use as possible, the... er... inexperience of our users means that we are getting a lot of support requests. We've also got a lot of ideas for enhancements but not enough time to implement them.

So this is a plea for more people to consider getting involved in the project. Even if you can only spare a couple of hours a week answering emails on the support mailing list, that would take some pressure off the small number of us who are currently doing it. This would be much appreciated. If you are interested, then please join either the support list or the developers list."


Perl 5.004_04: Too old (for me)

KLB on 2004-10-06T02:12:38

About being a developer ... the project asks for the programs to be runnable under version 5.004_04.

Well, that is just too ancient for me. Now, if the minimum version be 5.6, if not 5.8, that would be a different thing.

Re:Perl 5.004_04: Too old (for me)

jns on 2004-10-06T10:49:49

To elaborate on what Dave said, you shouldn't see your not having a 5.004_4 Perl as a barrier to joining the NMS development team, the programs are generally tested on multiple versions of Perl before being released and the admin doing the release will make any last minute fixes required if necessary. We appreciate that it might be a bit tricky for some people to get an older Perl on their computer.

If I get a minute I will add a note regarding the differences between current versions of Perl and 5.004_04 to the project documentation.

5.004_04

davorg on 2004-10-06T08:10:14

Welcome to our world :)

Our audience isn't Perl programmers. It (usually) isn't even people who have their own web server. It's people who rent a bit of shared hosting space from an ISP. Many of them have chosen the cheapest option possible. They are constrained by whatever software the ISP makes available.

And many of these ISPs aren't exactly run by Perl experts. They just have whatever version of Perl came installed with their operating system. In some cases that can go as far back as 5.004_04 (actually it can go further back - but I refuse to work with something that doesn't include CGI.pm).

Telling people to upgrade their version of Perl or change their ISP isn't an option. They just want something that works. Matt's scripts still work on Perl 4. If we tell them that our programs don't work on their set-up then they'll just go elsewhere.

And 5.004_04 isn't _so_ bad. The biggest restriction I find is that we don't allow CPAN modules (for very similar reasons).

mailing lists

cmilton on 2004-10-06T22:11:55

I'm not sure I need to join another mailing list or two that suffer(s) from SPAM and viruses.