Re: [PHP-GTK] Status of PHP-GTK

Hey Frederic,

OK, copying reply on-list (we had a bit of a mix-up earlier).

> Any halfway decent CMS should allow you to maintain the same user interface.
> In the case of D., I clone the gtk.php.net theme for php-gtk.eu, although it
> is not enabled to avoid such "branding" confusion, so it is clearly a
> non-issue.

To you perhaps :)

>> Ugh... you don't need special skills to build the manual.
>
> Anything more complicated than clicking on "edit", editing, then clicking on
> "save", is "specialist" level these days, I'd say.

'Build' != 'edit'

> This makes technical sense, of cours. However, "any major OSS project"
> doesn't use PhD, 

Again, 'build' != 'edit'... phd is a build system. I gather there are plans to evolve a phd-based editing system, but it's not there at this point in time. And even when it _is_ there, what it will be editing is pure DocBook XML.

or even Docbook. XHTML, for all its flaws, is pretty much
> the standard when it comes to publishing for the web or for mobile. 

DocBook generates HTML, XHTML, PHP, CHM, PDF... whatever you like really. Why tie yourself to a single possible output when you could have the full range at your fingertips?

Not for
> industry docs, of course, which is using Docbook or DITA anyway.
>
> Seen from here, it feels un-community-like, more typical of a corporate
> train of thought trying for openness, but refusing to take into account the
> fact that the actual expectations from casual, non-professional users are
> quite different and longing for a lower entry point.


It's not as simple as corporate vs community, it's more that the sheer size of the PHP project means we have big-project issues even for a relatively small php.net project. We simply don't have the freedom that a community site has.

These can contribute
> more entry-level docs than professional devs who have long forgotten what it
> was like to be a newbie. We see this every day in D., where most of the
> community doc and code outside core is actually done by new users on their
> learning process, with help (on IRC) from the doc team, but without such a
> "master plan".

Yes, this is where user notes play a strong part in PHP documentation. The idea is that users contribute and doc team members take the 'golden nuggets' and incorporate them into the manual. This worked well when PHP was a relatively small project with a keen hobbyist userbase. Now PHP is used in a much different context, we're seeing a lot of users who don't want to get involved but who do like to complain when they aren't spoon-fed, and the result is less useful manual notes and very few people willing to sift through them looking for the nuggets and/or deleting the irrelevant bits. Community efforts like yours are great, but how do you oversee quality?

PHP-GTK hasn't quite reached those dizzy heights, but suffers from the same userbase as PHP even though it's a relatively hobbyist project. We need people to invest something in the project for it to work, and yes often that means learning a new skill. Would you open up your own repository to people who refuse to learn a new skill?

> I cleaned up the pages from the spamming and hacking mess (the r57shell
> trojan is in the php.net CVS !) 

Let's point out here that the only way the trojan could've got there in the first place is via the wiki...

it in late 2007 when I ported them D. too,
> and although the site receives a few dozen attacks a day, it has never let
> any come in since. Not that it couldn't happen, of course, but it seems to
> resist fairly well for now.

You ported them to your own server; if you crash it or break something it's not a big problem, you can sort it out yourself. Ours is a server that belongs to someone else; for that reason we have very few people with root access. A number of us - myself included - have write access to the system scripts repository, but nobody without root can apply the changes made there. Ergo, any breakage of any kind is more problematic for php.net than it would be for an independent operator. As Liz wrote earlier, when we find a problem in any php.net site it means tracking down and harrassing one of the handful of people with root access to the affected server. If we do that it might be days or weeks before our sysadmin gets around to looking into the problem. If we can't be bothered to track down/harrass that person in the first place, there's never going to be a fix.

> Same for this: as you pobably know, I cleaned up this info too at the same
> time, obtained lost pages from archive.org which weren't even in CVS, 

Not possible. That's what CVS attic is for.

> put them online again. New entries have been added by members over time, and
> it is the most visited part of the site. So it *does* seem to work.

Adding new entries works - I assumed you'd simply taken the apps (!)

>> I think, given the experience we had with the wiki, it would be very
>> unlikely that Andrei would want to take the risk again on a Yahoo!
>> server carrying a whole bunch of php.net sites.
>
> The wiki was apparently not kept up-to-date patch-wise, which means once
> intruders noticed this, they were able to install r57shell and from here
> do pretty much what they wanted. More recent versions of pbWki, which you
> used then, are considerably more resilient, and also would have been at the
> time if updates had been applied.

I can't even remember who the wiki admin was. But I do know they won't have had root access. We're back to the problems I outlined earlier.

> But anyway, does gtk.php.net, being a fairly minor part of the PHP
> universe both for Y. and Z., need to be kept on a Y. server, if this
> worries Andrei ?

The fact that Y! are the benefactor in this case is irrelevant, since php.net as a group don't actually own any servers outright. Everyone donating a server and bandwidth deserves the same respect; we'd always try not to do anything that would mean using up unwarranted bandwidth or opening up the system to viral infection. The wiki idea has been tried and found wanting in that respect; the only wikis used by php.net these days are on private servers (Pierre's and Lukas').

- Steph