RE: Hosting of the cookbook

Noel Welsh wrote:
> 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.

I'm in complete agreement with all of this (up to and including being
lazy...)

> 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)

I agree with all of this in principle.  Initially, I'd suggest we could just
stick to ordinary signup with email confirmation, with the goal being to go
for the additional security measures as time or necessity permits/requires.

> 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.

wget was my thought also.

> 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.

I think #2 will involve some ongoing policing, not just editing pages but
making sure we have standards for layout, and that people know about them.
(Maybe some kind of script to check for known problems could help.)  I don't
think we've really worked out enough of the layout standards yet, but I
think some of it will have to evolve as content is added.

Anton



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