As of release 0.34, the Padre Perl IDE is reaching a level of stability and completeness where we're starting to think about the run up to 1.0 and what is left to go.
If you've never known the pleasure of being able to hack on your own editor, now is the perfect time for you to start experimenting with Padre.
So on behalf of the entire Padre team, I'd like to officially announce the Padre Plugin Contest (the third Vertical Metre of Beer competition).
And as you might have guessed, the goal is to create the best and shiniest new plugin possible, and the reward on offer is a 1 metre high pile of cases/cartons of your favourite beer. Dispensation of the award can be at a time and place of your choosing, but as you may have experienced at YAPC::EU 2008 some places are way more fun than others :)
The competition rules are as follows:
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1. Contestants are to create a plugin for Padre and submit it for judging before midnight GMT on the 31st May.
2. To submit a plugin, you should upload it with a non-developer version to the CPAN. We will consider the author that uploads the final tarball of the distribution before the deadline to be the contestant for reward purposes.
3. The plugin MUST be new. A "new" plugin for the purposes of the competition is defined as one that has never been uploaded to the CPAN as either a developer or production release.
4. As long as your entry loads correctly through the Padre Plugin Manager, there are NO limits to what you can do in the implementation. You are encouraged to completely screw with or overwrite the internals of Padre (from in your plugin) if that's what you think you need to do to make your plugin work. When we evaluate your plugin, we guarantee that ONLY your entry will be installed, so there will be no collisions with other entries.
4. You are permitted to upload multiple entries if you wish. Judgement of each plugin will be done independently of any other entries. Any votes you get across multiple entries will NOT be aggregated.
5. You are permitted to collaborate with others if you choose, since realistically we couldn't prevent it anyway. But we will ignore anyone other than the person that uploads the entry.
6. Plugins will be tested by the judges using Padre version 0.34. If you wish us to test against a newer release you need to explicitly say so in the Plugin POD. We will NOT test against older releases or the svn trunk.
7. Entries will be judged on the awesomely vague criteria of "best plugin". You are welcome to focus on a particular approach to being the "best" such as "shiny", "funny", "valuable", or "awesome". But whatever it is that you do, it needs to grab the attention of the judges.
8. Judging will be done by the entire Padre development team. We will be allocating votes based on line attribution (i.e. "blame") in the Padre repository trunk as of the 1st of May. We're using raw lines across the entire trunk, so that all our valued translators and existing plugin authors will have a strong vote. You can see the current line (and thus vote) break up at http://xrl.us/beq9ie
9. To avoid two of the big Padre developers overwhelming the rest, each judge will nominate their three favourite plugins and their lines will be distributed to those plugins evenly.
10. Finally, the competition is open to ANYONE including people that may have already uploaded a plugin already. To mitigate any unfair advantage, the four most active core developers (Gabor, Steffen, Jerome and I) have all volunteered to sit out of the competition and not complete.
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You have a month to show all of us your genius, and help drive Padre towards a glorious future.
If you have any questions, or would just like to follow along, you are welcome to join us in #padre on irc.perl.org, and any rules clarifications will be made available over the next few days.
Let the games begin!
I would be delighted to make a fiscal contribution to the prize either augmenting it (make it 4m if you want) or sharing your costs.
Lemme know where to point the credit card.
Feel free to join #padre on irc.perl.org if you need more info or help getting started. It's where Padre folks hang out a lot.
