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I'm not happy with the "gravatars" on search.cpan.org.

hex on 2007-09-13T10:45:37

While I appreciate the intent behind the recent decision to add these "gravatars" to search.cpan, I feel that the execution has been poorly thought through. This is a summation of points raised so far.

  1. While it looks nice, Gravatar is slow as crystals forming on a frozen monkey's ass. This has led to the necessity of having to write a daily grab-and-cache system for the images. If it's that bad, why don't we just write something ourselves that doesn't suck?

  2. Poor URI design at gravatar.com: http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=aae56c6a384319c00094d626845f6b6d

  3. It costs money ($10/year) to have more than one email address added to the system. Frankly, the commercial aspirations of the person who runs Gravatar are embarassingly transparent. That went out with the bubble, guy. If you're going to propose a "global" system like this, you have to do it for free, because that's what people expect - cf. OpenID. If you don't, somebody else will. (I wouldn't be surprised if someone in the Perl community up and does it, simply because of how poor gravatar.com is.)

  4. Talking of OpenID, I commented on one of the above posts that I'd only use Gravatar if it supported OpenID logins. I've been signing up to various websites for well over a decade now, and I'm dog tired. It's bad enough that I have separate PAUSE and BitCard and use.perl logins already; now we're going to throw in yet another incompatible system?

    Yes, I know, as Schwern points out, that implementing OpenID support in PAUSE and Gravatar would take some work. The burden here falls largely on Gravatar. PAUSE doesn't need to fully support OpenID logins yet, but it could simply have a field for OpenID URIs in user settings and query Gravatar on that basis.

  5. Not every search.cpan user reads use.perl.org. Adding this feature to search.cpan.org without wider consultation is, I feel, a mistake.

  6. Having a user picture on author pages is fine, but I don't want my ugly mug staring out at people from documentation for my modules. Sorry, but that just looks unprofessional.

  7. If you're going to add "social" features, you have to go the whole hog. Add user accounts to search.cpan, with preferences. One of those preferences must be "Display author pictures?"

  8. Where is Graham? Why has he not participated in any discussions on this site so far, and we have to email our comments to him? And why is the code that runs search.cpan.org not open? I've heard that question asked over and over, and we've never had a satisfactory response.

  9. Before we start adding new stuff, can't we get our own house in order first?

    • cpanratings.perl.org → ratings.cpan.org
    • cpanforum.com → forum.cpan.org
    • annocpan.org → annotate.cpan.org


    Yes, I know these are all different projects, but even though they're all fairly-well accepted by now, there's barely any interconnection between them, and they don't even have similar URIs. We're a mess.

Until some more thought has been put into this, I think I'm going to follow the example of LotR on #perl and add gravatar.com (and search.cpan.org cached copies) to my AdBlock filters.

-- Earle

Good luck with your own CPAN site

brian_d_foy on 2007-09-13T20:48:29

If you don't like Gravatars or CPAN Search, you don't have to participate. But, not only that, you can write your own. OF course, when you start that, you'll realize why the guy is asking for $10. Also, if Graham wants to spend his time doing other things and doesn't want to make his site open source, who cares? It's his project and he can do whatever he likes with it. You can start you're own project that meets your own non-technical. sociological, and political goals and do whatever you like with it.

Pictures are amazingly calming to people. People are much nicer about articles in The Perl Review once I added author pictures, and I added author pictures because I knew that would happen. Schwern wants to do the same thing for CPAN. Perl is people, after all.

Your points just sounds like more "I should get stuff for free" whining, which entails nobody buying themselves food or paying their rent and having to ask permission to do what they like with their own project. It certainly isn't based in Freedom. You, however, have the freedom of choice. Try Kobes' Search for a Gravatar-free alternative.

So, good luck and let us know when you have your site ready. :)

Re:Good luck with your own CPAN site

david.romano on 2007-09-14T00:01:09

I agree with much of what you said, but I think one of Earle's points you didn't address is:

Before we start adding new stuff, can't we get our own house in order first?

  • cpanratings.perl.org → ratings.cpan.org
  • cpanforum.com → forum.cpan.org
  • annocpan.org → annotate.cpan.org

This didn't really have to do with gravatars, but I think it would help show the cohesiveness of the Perl community to outsiders if it did happen. Why wouldn't the community want that?

I understand that it would create work for Graham to change the links from cpanforum and annocpan to forum.cpan.org and annotate.cpan.org. Maybe he doesn't want to do it and that's fine. But I think Earle was just bringing up the idea for others (including Graham, Gabor, and Ivan) to mull over. I don't think this point fits in to the whole "I should get stuff for free" whining that you think his other parts exude. It seems like a good suggestion to me.

Re:Good luck with your own CPAN site

Alias on 2007-09-14T02:08:39

I agree with the site naming part.

It would also be a good idea to put links to the various sites on the front page of cpan.org, because people will go there looking for various sites.

Re:Good luck with your own CPAN site

brian_d_foy on 2007-09-14T04:22:31

I like that projects have their own domains. I like to think that there are a lot of different people out there interested enough in Perl to do these cool things, rather than some big organization doing it. I like decentralization :)

As for links on www.cpan.org, that would be nice, but no normal people really cares what's in the HREF. All the links are in CPAN Search right with the module page :)

Re:Good luck with your own CPAN site

Aristotle on 2007-09-14T03:39:33

I agree. Everyone who wants to contribute:

  1. Should start his own project.
  2. Provide his own server infrastructure.
  3. Evangelise in the community for the weeks or maybe months until he has some semblance of traction.
  4. Continue maintaining his project in isolation from the other similar projects.

I don’t understand why people would want to pool their resources. In a situation with limited volunteer tuits available, it’s most effective to divide them over as many similar projects as possible.

Re:Good luck with your own CPAN site

brian_d_foy on 2007-09-14T04:14:05

Well, it works. I did it with Perl Mongers and The Perl Review, and many people have done it with their projects.

When you remove the irony, you are really saying:

1. Everyone must let just anyone mess with their project
2. Someone who doesn't get paid should make their infrastructure open to everyone else, and maintain it for them
3. People shouldn't have to work hard to promote their own work
4. Somebody else should do most of the work

Thre's no problem here, except people thinking they have a right to something that's not theirs.

It's really easy to work on other people's projects. Step one is not being a public ass about it. You complain in public and attack people, and you just about kill your chances to help out. It's not a hard concept to understand, but geeks don't like it because it involves people skills.

Perl has a good thing goijng. We're the most kick ass community there is. That's not enough for some people. They have to whine about pictures on CPAN Search.

Re:Good luck with your own CPAN site

Aristotle on 2007-09-14T07:27:49

Apologies in advance for the “quote every sentence and respond to it” style of this comment. I hate it and try to avoid it, but there’s no other way to write this one. It boggles my mind how you manage to get every single aspect exactly backwards.

Everyone must let just anyone mess with their project

How does setting up to make the contribution of patches possible imply that you are somehow forced to apply all patches you get?

Someone who doesn’t get paid should make their infrastructure open to everyone else, and maintain it for them

How does accepting some patches (and others, not) equate to making your infrastructure available to other people and maintaining it for them?

People shouldn’t have to work hard to promote their own work

You misunderstood completely. The point isn’t that people shouldn’t have to promote a new site; it’s that they shouldn’t have to set up competing services in the first place when they could cooperate with an existing one. You championed a situation in which competition is the default. That makes no sense; there aren’t enough tuits to go around in the first place, never mind pitting them against each other. Cooperation should be the default.

Somebody else should do most of the work.

This makes no sense whatsoever. If you make it easy for people to send you patches, you say, the contributors would be letting somebody else do most of the work. What? Does not compute.

Step one is not being a public ass about it.

Yeah, says the guy who responded to a mostly reasoned critique by writing a comment titled “Good luck with your own CPAN site” wherein he tells the other guy to love it or leave it.

It’s not a hard concept to understand, but geeks don’t like it because it involves people skills.

Oh please, not the “geeks with no social skills” triticism again. Wasn’t it you just saying people should avoid being an ass in public?

We’re the most kick ass community there is.

*snort*

Re:Good luck with your own CPAN site

hex on 2007-09-14T09:27:24

Step one is not being a public ass about it. You complain in public and attack people, and you just about kill your chances to help out. It's not a hard concept to understand, but geeks don't like it because it involves people skills.

You were doing badly enough until you got to this part when you started insulting me. I had a nice, long, reasoned reply mentally queued up to go, but you just killed your chance of ever seeing it. Instead I feel moved to say this: brian, go fuck yourself.

Re:Good luck with your own CPAN site

petdance on 2007-09-14T15:58:14

brian, go fuck yourself.

What a swell way to tell people that you're not someone to work with.

Re:Good luck with your own CPAN site

vek on 2007-09-14T20:24:31

Whereas calling someone a 'public ass' is the perfect way to announce you're Mr Congeniality ;-)

Rough consensus and running code.

schwern on 2007-09-14T09:25:14

There is part of me that just wants to yell, "FOR FUCK'S SAKE IT'S A 40 BY 40 PICTURE! SUCK IT UP YOU BAG OF WHINGERS!" So I will. And it's not just at you, hex, it's more a building frustration that this Gravatar thing frames.

You know what really pisses me off? What ever happened to "hey, cool idea! A little rough around the edges, but I see where you're going." Maybe even, "here's a patch to make it better." No, I get "it doesn't do EXACTLY what I want EXACTLY the way I want it so I'm going to block it AND I'm going to complain about it publicly". What the hell is that? Don't like it? Either A) help or B) ignore it -- but above all, get the hell out of the way of people doing work. Trying new things. Experimenting. And doing it without a bunch of people nit-picking their every move. I can take this crap, but I've been doing this a long time. It scares people, keeps them from being bold, and we lose good people because of it. If people don't feel they can try new things we're dead.

What ever happened to rough consensus and running code? That's what made Perl great, pragmatism. It took me and Graham maybe an hour to put up something that works pretty good. Now we can play with it. Now we can work on improving it. Now we can know what works and what doesn't by TRYING IT not by sitting around and talking about it forever. It's live, it works, it's here and now.

If we tried to put together all the shit you're talking about it would be a year later and we'd have nothing. The implementation has been thought through as much as it needs to be to get it off the ground. No, we're not going to write our own bloody protocol. No, we're not going to implement OpenID. No, we're not going to have a community discussion about it. No, we're not going to write a whole social user preferences system JUST TO PUT A PICTURE ON A WEB SITE! That's all crap we can add later if it turns out we need it. If we're so calcified that we can't even do that without people getting upset we're doomed.

Your points are about implementation details. They don't actually effect the user. Stop worrying so much about the bloody implementation details and look at the idea. The idea is what's important. What it does is what's important. How you use it is what's important. Are you going to work on it? No? Then why do you care? Implementation can be changed. We're good programmers, we know how to do that. Unless you're actually doing the work, stop talking about how it does it and start talking about what it does. Why it does it. What can we do with it? What would make it more awesome?

You want OpenID for CPAN? Great, go work on it. Talk with Andreas and Graham about it. Work something out. You want a more reliable Gravatar server? A cached mirror would be trivial, you don't even have to parse the protocol. Gravatar::URL is already even setup to use a different base URL. You could implement it in less time then it would take to respond to this. You don't like how the author pictures are displayed on search? Ok, send feedback to Graham via proper channels. You don't like something? HELP FIX IT! Bitching is not doing.

End of rant.

And dear lord, no more centralization of Perl web stuff. That's what got us into this sort of mess in the first place. But that's another rant.

Re:Rough consensus and running code.

hex on 2007-09-14T09:49:42

[replies in no particular order]

Ok, send feedback to Graham via proper channels. You don't like something? HELP FIX IT! Bitching is not doing.

I'm sorry, but when it comes to THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT SITE IN THE ENTIRE PERL WORLD, I like to discuss things in public. Because you know what? There's no mailing list for it. No newsgroup. No wiki. use.perl is the closest thing we have. If you, Graham or brian aren't happy with a public and gravely important community website being discussed in public, that's tough luck.

Are you going to work on it? No? Then why do you care?

Did I say I wouldn't work on it? No, I didn't. Please don't stuff your assumptions into my mouth. I guess I have to talk slowly here: Maybe... if... search.cpan... is... OPEN SOURCE... then people... will... VOLUNTEER PATCHES.

Think about that for a minute.

What ever happened to rough consensus and running code?

Whatever happened to showing the code to us so we can do stuff with it? Whatever happened to demo versions with custom patches? Whatever happened to treating users like adults, rather than telling them to ask daddy for a change to the big important website?

That's what made Perl great, pragmatism.

Pragmatism is open source. search.cpan is not open source. (And brian obviously thinks pragmatism is "go reinvent the wheel for your own clone site despite the blindingly obvious fact that nobody will use it because 99.9% of all Perl module users use search.cpan".)

No, we're not going to have a community discussion about it.

Too late, you're already in one.

Re:Rough consensus and running code.

petdance on 2007-09-14T14:28:12

99.9% of all Perl module users use search.cpan

You're in a vicious cycle. Nobody will write something different because everyone uses search.cpan.org. Everyone uses search.cpan.org because nobody has written something different. (Not to dis on kobeserach, of course, but it's also mostly the same as search.cpan.org. There's little radically different.)

But the attitude of "this is the site that everyone uses" is exactly the centralization that Schwern is talking about. Where are the CPAN mashups?

Re:Rough consensus and running code.

Aristotle on 2007-09-14T19:20:08

Where are the CPAN APIs?

Re:Rough consensus and running code.

petdance on 2007-09-14T21:04:52

Make your own mirror. You have all you need to make aristotlecpan.com.

Re:Rough consensus and running code.

Aristotle on 2007-09-15T01:04:33

What is that non-sequitur a reply to?

Your asked where the CPAN mashups are. I answered that the existing services provide no APIs, so no mashups get written. And no, a dump of several gigabytes worth of moderately inconsistent data in quirky formats does not an API constitute.

Re:Rough consensus and running code.

hfb on 2007-09-15T01:12:42

You know the beautiful thing about perl is that I can mostly disappear for a few years, have a kid, not give a damn and casually stroll through one evening out of curiosity and find the same shit going around the spin cycle. I giggle at the thought of Schwern telling anyone to offer Graham patches. Holy fuck, what a sadist he is. :)

That code likely rates so high on the scale of milibarrs that it would inflict rapid cranial decompression for most who would gaze lustily upon it. It has been almost a decade and I'd recommend just giving up on that particular crusade. When nobody gives a fuck anymore, he'll release it. :)

Talk to Kobes as that code is public and, last I knew, he does seem open to patches and such.

*snerk* when is the rant about the PDK going to surface again? :D