DSSS, Dsource, and cpan

[Walter Bright]

eao197 wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 10:40:10 +0400, Walter Bright 
> <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> 
>> I.e., can we change dsource so that there are two kinds of projects:
>>
>> 1) Projects that are not certified, and
>> 2) Projects that are certified
> 
> I think certification should be optional and not certified projects 
> should not be seen as second-class projects in comparision with 
> certified (first-class) projects.

In any repository of projects, there's going to be a very wide range of 
quality. There are going to be first rate projects, second rate ones, 
and third rate ones. If a new D user takes a look at dsource, is there 
any way he can tell the difference without a large investment of his time?

There are other ways to rank projects besides a certification process. 
One could be like the 'digg' system where registered users can do a 
thumbs up or thumbs down on a particular project. Then, the new D user 
can just look at highly rated ones if he chooses.

A variation on that would be where certain annointed moderators give the 
rankings.

> A live example is RubyGems at RubyForge -- there isn't any certification 
> and RubyForge's RubyGems archive works. And that is fine because 
> RubyForge hosts Gems from (at least) 1500 projects [1] and new projects 
> start almost every day [2]. It is hard to imagine that someone tries to 
> certificate part of those projects and their different versions. I have 
> several my projects on RubyForge and one of them can pass its unit-test 
> only in special environment. That project can't pass automatic 
> certification procedure based on unit-tests, but it works.
 >
> So I don't think manual certification will possible if DSource starts 
> host a big amount of projects comparable with RubyForge and CPAN.

That is a good point. But that's why uncertified projects wouldn't be 
excluded from the system - it's just that certified ones meet certain 
requirements. Certainly, there can be good ones that cannot meet the 
requirements.

> Ddoc documentation may be important for some kind of projects, like 
> libraries. But for other types it simply doesn't matter. DSSS is a good 
> example -- I don't want to look into its code, but I wish to have 
> advanced documentaion. In some cases such documentation can't be 
> produced by ddoc and needs other tools (like LaTeX, DocBook, DocUtils 
> and ReStructuredText, etc). And for checking quality of documentation a 
> manual certification required. But see above :(

You're right in the case of non-libraries. But I think the ddoc 
requirement should apply to libraries.

>> Boost, another successful library repository, also adds on peer 
>> review. Perhaps in the future, as our user base grows, we can add 
>> another layer of certification for projects that pass peer review.
> 
> Boost is a different beast. Boost pretends to be a big library with all 
> its parts coupled together. And each part will be available to user 
> 'out-of-box' after installing Boost (AFAIK there is a special tool, bcp, 
> which can be used to extract only necessary part of Boost, but it seems 
> that bcp don't used widely). And in C++ there are some other factors 
> like compiler (one may have VC++7.1, VC++8.0 and MinGW C++ installed at 
> the same time and for each compiler Boost must be compiled separately) 
> and different compilation modes (dll/lib, static/shared RTL). So 
> inclusion of new library in Boost via review is a righteous approach for 
> Boost.
> 
> And yet another difference: Boost is a collection of _libraries_. Not 
> all projects at DSource are libraries now and not all will be in future.

I agree. Perhaps the certification process should only be applied to 
libraries. The Boost peer review does have a somewhat different agenda, 
I was just referring to the part of its agenda where the Boost libraries 
have to pass a certain level of quality. I think that could be a very 
valuable filter for someone looking for the best of the best D libraries.

> So I don't think certification on DSource is a good thing. There are 
> other resources which can be used for such rating/review. Ohloh [3] for 
> example.
> 
> [1] http://gems.rubyforge.org/stats.html
> [2] http://rubyforge.org/ (sections 'GForge Stats' and 'Recently 
> Registered Projects')
> [3] http://www.ohloh.net
> 
> PS. Excuse me for my poor English, I'm just learning.

Your english is  excellent. No apologies are necessary.

> --Regards,
> Yauheni Akhotnikau