http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=482712

EvdB has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

A while back I coded up http://prlmnks.org (RSS feeds to perlmonks.org) and posted about it here. It recieved a good reaction and has been seeing moderate usage ever since.

Now I am far too busy to properly look after it and people are starting to notice when it misbehaves - mainly with dodgy characters getting into the XML. What I want to do is to open it up and let any and everyone work on it if they want to.

How should I do this? I could put it on sourceforge, I could make it a CPAN module and accept patches, I could find one person who wants to work on it and give it to them.

It is all slightly complicated by the fact that it is a web service. I am happy to continue hosting it but it should only be hosted in one place - mainly to keep the load on perlmonks proper down and mainly so that people know where to go for it.

Any and all thoughts, experiences etc welcomed.

-- Me, me, me: http://prlmnks.org/rss-feeds.html, http://scrpbk.com/~evdb, http://ecclestoad.co.uk.

Moved from PerlMonks Discussion to Seekers of Perl Wisdom by davido per consideration.

  • Comment on Giving code to the community - but how?

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Re: Giving code to the community - but how?
by gryphon (Abbot) on Aug 11, 2005 at 02:59 UTC

    Greetings EvdB,

    As someone who frequently uses http://prlmnks.org, first of all, thank you. It's a very practical and useful service you're providing. If you want to continue to host the service, bravo.

    As for handing over the code to the community, I certainly recommend SourceForge for the whole of the project (including any related HTML or what-not). I would shy away from adding a CPAN module though, as your service is fairly specific to PerlMonks and doesn't contain (as far as I can tell) components that would want to run apart from the rest of the application.

    There are a couple things you should know before you publish your project, though:

    • As soon as you go open source, all sorts of people are going to expect you to make bug fixes, and sometimes they can be very demanding
    • It may be very difficult to get folks to help out beyond just fixing a little bug here and there

    I don't mean to sound negative. It's just a good idea to know what's coming. It's helpful to have a little patience with the users out there who lack it.

    gryphon
    Whitepages.com Development Manager (DSMS)
    code('Perl') || die;

[reply]
Re: Giving code to the community - but how?
by shiza (Hermit) on Aug 10, 2005 at 19:57 UTC
    I'd suggest sourceforge for your application.

    If you've written some logic that you think would be useful in other situations, throw it in a module, integrate it into your application, and post it to CPAN in the appropriate category.

    Is the problem of unwanted/dodgy characters inherit to another module, or is it specific to your application?
[reply]
Re: Giving code to the community - but how?
by EvdB (Deacon) on Aug 15, 2005 at 20:27 UTC
[reply]

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