DSSS, Dsource, and cpan

[eao197]

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.

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.

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 :(

> 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.

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.

-- 
Regards,
Yauheni Akhotnikau