Wishing to take advantage of the Winter of Code offer to pay for the resumption of This Week on perl5-porters, and noting my lack of recent income, I've decided to go ahead and write a summary for last week and submit it for consideration. I've taken as my inspiration the summaries done last year by grinder.
Several things I found out while doing this. Took me about two hours to do the actual skimming of the threads and writing. Another hour for formatting and linking, which will become faster. That's a weekly amount of effort I can deal with.
nntp.perl.org is an inadequate list archive for this purpose. The biggest problem being that it throws out anything that's not plain text including attachments. Thus, no patches. So at the end I switched over to the older archive at xray.
I toyed around with the idea of tagging each entry with things like "bug", "docs", "patch", "feature", "unapplied", "unanswered" and so on. I still think it's a good idea, I just don't have the syntax to do anything with it. By tagging open problems and bugs, and summarizing them, I hope it will be easier for someone to come along and do a little work. I also hope to prevent patches from being dropped on the floor.
I neglected to link entries about specific bugs and patches to their perlbug entries, something I'll rectify.
The wiki was used because when I want to write a bunch of formatted text with links, I reach for wiki markup. It seems to work. I might toy around with a blog format, this makes tagging easier and also linking to specific entries rather than whole weeks. Some sort of POD formatter would also be acceptable.
Re:Will they be sent by email too?
schwern on 2007-12-11T00:25:33
Oh, I didn't see there was already a mailing list. Emailing it introduces formatting issues. I like to embed links, plain text is not friendly to that and everyone will bitch loudly if I send HTML mail.
I might just do that anyway. For the moment I'll just send off a link to the list.
I will likely also set up an RSS feed. Then you can do whatever you like with it.Re:Will they be sent by email too?
Aristotle on 2007-12-11T00:32:42
I prefer stuff being pushed to me
There’s this newfangled thing, have you heard of it? They call it RSS…
:-) Re:Will they be sent by email too?
drhyde on 2007-12-16T19:25:17
Yeah, I tried it once, but it sucks cos I have to go to a web site to read it. All of the websites and all of the desktop tools suck in different ways.
Then I found rss2email, which looks at all the bloody things and emails them to me. Email is the way of the future.
Re:Will they be sent by email too?
schwern on 2007-12-16T23:16:27
Yeah, I tried it once, but it sucks cos I have to go to a web site to read it. All of the websites and all of the desktop tools suck in different ways.
And this is different from email how? Oh, you're used to the way they it sucks.
"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." -- Jeremy Blosser about mutt
At least there's no RSS spam... yet.RSS spam?
Aristotle on 2007-12-17T00:32:08
Nor will there ever be – not the way email spam works. For the user, RSS works like a push medium, just like email, but technically, it’s a pull medium (as is the web in general), unlike SMTP. Short of hacking a weblog you’re subscribed to, there is no way for a spammer to send you spam if you don’t knowingly subscribe to his feed. Feed polling, unlike email receipt, has a built-in notion of trust (by way of "I trust this URI to give me wanted things and not unwanted things enough to subscribe it").
(However, there is comment spam. Again, a push medium without a notion of trust: there’s a weblog engine sitting around and waiting for various and sundry anonymously sent messages to be submitted to it.)
