Re: [boost] blincubator comments

Subject: Re: [boost] blincubator comments
From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-06-19 15:28:56

Sohail Somani-2 wrote
> Hi Robert,
> 
> First of all, great idea and thanks for doing it. The concepts are solid 
> and the site will be a great help for users and authors alike.
> 
> It appeared that it was not possible to add any reviews anonymously. Is 
> this by design? 

yep - mainly spam prevention - but anonymous posting encourages
trolls in my opinion.

> Does one have to register? It would be clearer if the 
> page was unavailable or that there was a placeholder requiring the 
> visitor to register before they could view the "submit review" page[1].
> 
> I closed the page after writing a review and being unable to submit 
> because it seemed the site was buggy and so I set out to submit a 
> report, but maybe the mistake was that I was supposed to have registered 
> first. It was unclear.

OK - will fix

> Also, if you ever do consider writing another version, 

lol - you've got to be kidding!

> consider Django 
> because the admin interface[2] could allow you to generate a nice 
> interface without futzing around with plugins and can also help you 
> create a more maintainable site because it forces you into a structure. 
> I'd be happy to help if you choose to go this way.

I'd love to see someone take responsibility for this - are you interested?

> General question: are there any other sites/applications of this kind 
> out there? It seems to be a generally useful thing to make it easier to 
> solicit user contributions for open source software. The closest would 
> be a fork+pull request in Github that people can comment on. Maybe 
> that's enough, I don't know.

The only reason I did this was because I couldn't find it anywhere else.
There are pieces of this all over the place 

sourceforge
github
lots of others

But nowhere did I find all the functionality in one place.  And another
problem is that
lots of library authors already have their own choice for all of the things.

rypll was interesting in that it desired to provide a unitified
system for library development.  I was never sold on
the idea that one could be successful by telling 
library authors what to do.  (I can get barely get anyone
to listen to my suggestions).  And besides - it's a huge
amount of work do something of this scale.

So my approach was to make a "facade" which would:

a) permit an author to use what he already has for repository,
issues, testing dashboard, etc.  This would  make it easier to make
a submission.  So far this has worked out well.  There are already
multiple kinds of repositories and test dashboards being used by
different authors.  Apparenly they had no problem making a submission.
The main obstacle for a submission is that I require browsable 
html documentation.  This seems to be huge hurdle for many
authors - we're all better off for it.

b) Not have to do any of the facilities myself since it's pointless
to replicate other's work - and let them maintain it.  If they do
a bad job - then authors will switch and just update their links.
You can see the whole point is for me to avoid doing any actual
work - which of course is why I'm a software developer in the
first place.

c) present an unified interface to a variety of underlying
tool implementations.  The user interface "facade".  This
is to make it easy to brows documentation, code and
issues etc in a more or less unified way.  Basically I want
a user to be able to evaluate 10 libraries in an hour so
he can accept one for his own application.  Currently this
takes a couple of days to do.

) I did make special component just for boost - the review 
system.  As you can see from the "about" section of the
website - I looked at lots of alternatives.  I stopped when
I found wordpress and am mostly pleased with the results.
Its a pain to use and has some quirks - but the 11 plugins
are code that I use but didn't have to write.  The admin
and stats page all come for free.  I'm very skeptical that
another tool would have done a better job.  But of course
I didn't try every tool - I just stopped when I found the
first one that could actually do the job.

Robert Ramey

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