Re: Guile project submissions draft

[Greg Harvey <Greg.Harvey@thezone.net>]

Lalo Martins <lalo@webcom.com> writes:

> On Mar 10, Greg Harvey decided to present us with:
> > 
> > This is a hastily jotted format for the email submission
> > format. Ideas, advice, and opinions appreciated (let's try to keep it
> > at least pg-13, though ;')
> 
> I like it.
> 
> > Each contents of each field must be enclosed in parenthesis... easy to
> > parse, easy to make sure that exactly what you think is being
> > submitted is being submitted. The only annoyance this brings is the
> > necessity to escape '()' in the text (do the \( \) thing).
> 
> So you can later write a Guile parser? ;-)

The thought had crossed my mind ;') 

> > %location (url): this should be a pointer to the homepage of the
> > project, or the distribution if no page is available.
> 
> %mailing-list?

Good idea, I've added that (as %mailinglist).

> > %catagory (cat): this will be one of a set of pre-defined
> > catagories. Basically, things like Application/Game or Library
> > (module?) 
> 
> How can I classify feast? :-) Game-engine?

Probably under (Application/Game), or (Library/Game). I would like to
see some ideas for classifications, though (I'll try to flesh
something out).

> > %author (name): the main author of the project (should this be authors?)
> 
> This gives the impression that there would be a field for
> "other" authors. Perhaps call this "authors" but label "primary
> authors" in the resulting page, and add "mailing-list" (enought
> to find "other" authors).
> 
> Also, mailing-list should IMO contain either
> mailto:subscribe-address or http://list.home/page
> 
> > %contact (addr): an email contact for the maintainer (should this be
> > folded into author(s)?)
> 
> I think it should. It's how we're used to see things (like email
> headers).

Actually, I'm thinking:

%authors (name 1 [email 1], ...)
%maintainer (name [email])

since the authors don't necessarily want to be bugged (particularly if
they aren't actually working on it anymore, or if it's a different
project based on their code... for example, I'm pretty sure Aubrey
Jaffer doesn't want to get guile bug reports). 

I think that you should also be able to put a url in any place, and
have it generate a link, so that you could do:

%authors (Foo Bar <foo@bar.org>, http://bar.org/other-authors.html)

However, this probably needs a method to specify the text for a
link... possibly have urls enclosed in [], where you have
[url,desc-text]? I want to keep it very simple, but I think this would
be useful.

> 
> > 1) Modification history of the various fields (how much will this
> >    cost, though... and how long should each bit of history be kept? I
> >    have no idea about the capacity of the host here).
> 
> Keep 2 previous versions of everything just to have an "undo",
> but keep _all_ previous versions of "status" (and perhaps
> "author"). IMHO.
> 

Yep, that sounds good (though I'm not quite sure how you'd handle
this... I'm guessing that storing the entries in a database is the
best approach, though my experience with databases is woefully small,
so I'm not quite sure how you'd go about keeping previous values).

-- 
Greg