Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] any need for a perl monger?

[Sylvain Beucler]

Hi Karl,

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 07:25:45PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
>     I was just up on FSF.org and it said to email if interested in 
>     volunteering Perl skills for the cause.  What can I do to help out? I've 
>     been using Perl for over a decade at work and at play.
> 
> I don't know how to answer this volunteer, so I hope someone else will.
> 
> But it brings up something I was going to write about it.  Here is what
> the gnu.org/help entry for savannah (the very top item) says now:
> 
>   <li>Help improve <a href="http://savannah.gnu.org";>Savannah</a>. We
>   are looking for technical volunteers to help handle pending project
>   submissions, improve older PHP code, work on the Perl backend, and
>   help with various anti-spam systems. If you can help with any of
>   these items, please email us
>   at <a href="mailto:address@hidden";>&lt;address@hidden&gt;</a>. Improving
>   Savannah will make development easier for the nearly 3,000 free
>   software projects hosted there.</li>
> 
> (Which explains why random php and perl hackers write in.)

Yes, we weren't contacted about it (before or after this was posted or
updated).  Coordination, coordination... :)


> Correct me if I'm wrong, but "pending project submissions" seems far
> more critical to me than the other issues, and we don't give any useful
> guidelines for who can help with that or what is involved.  I suggest we
> clearly separate that out and discuss it in more detail.

There's a start here:
http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/HowToBecomeASavannahHacker

> We could do the same for the other ways to help, e.g., link to pages on
> the wiki.
> 
> If it sounds ok, I'll try to write some text along those lines.


The main issue is that there aren't moderators out there _ready_ for
the task, they need some careful teaching, and hopefully they won't
leave out of annoyment when you're done teaching (like the previous
ones).

RMS suggested that we use fossology.org (C/PHP) and/or 'licensecheck'
(Perl, http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/devscripts), possibly
adding changes, and design a tool to help submitters check the
licenses more quickly.

Well, I first suggested we did less/no tarballs checks (it's usually
fast to check the description and decide on the project status) but
apparently that's not an option.

I'm currently thinking we need a tool similar to lintian or rpmlint,
but meant for Savannah (possibly Savannah exclusively), that we would
use _and_ ask the users to use.  We would say "your project must be
analysed by the tool w/o errors" (although there can be warnings), and
this would make clearer what the hard requirements are.  Now we need
to know whether writing such a tool is feasible.

Steve's Perl skills would come in handy here. This would probably be a
longer-term improvement than temporary helping in approving projects.

WDYT?

-- 
Sylvain