RE: Hosting of the cookbook

Noel Welsh <noelwelsh-/[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.lisp.scheme.plt.schematics
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi all,

Some thoughts:

Annotations vs Free Edits
-------------------------

My preference is for wiki-esque free edits vs
privileged immutable recipes and annotations.  Why? 
It
allows recipes to be iteratively refined to
perfection,
versus the reader reading and integrating all the
comments to obtain the final version (A small example
in the Python cookbook is

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/194373)

This makes several assumptions about the community:
potential editors, like me, are lazy and won't do much
work :-) and the contributors will be of high quality
so iterative revision will improve not decrease
quality.


Access Control
--------------

I'm agreed some sort of access control is needed.
Manual spamming can be effectively fought with any
decent system.  Automatic spamming must be made too
difficult to be worthwhile.  I suggest:

 - only signed up users can contribute

 - signing up requires typing in a phrase/number
 displayed in a non-machine readable graphic (ala
 Slashdot) OR email verification.  I personally prefer
 the phrase/number idea as it gets people contributing
 faster

 - some sort of flow control to stop robots hammering
 the site (e.g. edits only allowed every 20 seconds)


Generating Releases
-------------------

There are two issues here:

 1. Generating tarballs for local installs
 2. Generating text for a printed document

I think 1. can be addressed with wget and some link
munging.  Addressing 2...I can only think of two
things
that might help: make certain recipes unchangeable
when
they reach a high enough standard and force all
recipes
to explicitly annotate code.

Noel

=====
Email: noelwelsh <at> yahoo <dot> com
Jabber: noelw <at> jabber <dot> org


	
		
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