Re: [Slashcode-general] I volunteer to help resuscitate Slashcode

[Shane Z. <sh...@lo...>]

Hello everyone.

I was quite "surprised" to see any email from this listserve. Honestly, I had thought I unsubscribed from it last year, guess not ;)

I don't agree with the below summarization. I think they were saying "look, we do not have the time, resources to do everything that is required to do a proper release build, so we're not packing up tarballs/zips anymore. If you want it, grab it from SCM. If it passes our builds and tests, we tag it R_{foo}. You can base your own stability builds/tests off that versioning, where T_{foo} is unstable."

I not see anything wrong with this, in that there is hardly a project I have participated in over the past few years that I didn't clone (or fork) the project from Github. A zip? A tarball? How antiquated.

I also did not see anything wrong with them saying "we don't have the resources to do a full release". This is a community, afterall. If you want a release, work at it. Is this cumbersome? It can be. Is it community damning? It can be. Maybe it was. But I don't recall anyone from the community stepping up and saying "I'll devote the time, resources, effort, to do releases". (IMHO, to do properly, it's a lot of work, especially if there's no propert test/TDD rig/harness system already in place to help automate things).

I think it's been nearly a year since I did anything slashcode related. I closed my ISP hosting business in 2010, which had a sole last straggling slashcode-using customer until sometime last year. But as to development, ~2009 when I last really did any work in slashcode. I think it was the Geo patch/plugin, which was never finished nor publicly released.

The thing that upset me was the migration from Subversion to Git. Updates to the public tree were seemingly stopped. Replies were "we're getting it setup... just hold on a bit" to "we know it's not working... hold on a bit". To this day, to my knowledge, none of the Geek.net code-base changes have been pushed the public Git repo. If it even exists still? On SF? Github? Look at the log: http://bit.ly/hwRAB2 the last commit was 16 months ago? C'mon, you've got to be kidding me.

Slashcode was, is, a great engine. In many aspects it's design/implementation were far, far ahead of the curve; quite possibly still are. If one tended to have the perl modules it required installed (ie you were already hosting various perl-based projects/websites *or* you just had done a lot of perl development over the years) the installation of Slashcode could be an absolute *breeze*. But w/o the modules, it could be tricky. And let's be clear -- it was the modules/supporting software infrastructure that was a PITA to deal with, not Slashcode's installation. 

As far as someone resurrecting this CMS and putting a group of people together to move it forward, I wish you all the best and I hope you pull it off. I now have current engagements and commitments to other projects, I do not think I have the time, resources, and possibly not even the inclination, to help with this cause.

With that said, this *is* open source. If you could get the Slashdot crew to do a push to their git repo, one could take it, fork it, and run with it. Even if one isn't a developer, you can either learn to be, or devote your time/help in many other ways (documentation/testing/builds/PR... or just plain $$$ so the developers can feed their families).

 Shane



On Feb 4, 2011, at 5:13 AM, Eric Dannewitz wrote:

> And the last post on slash code was basically saying we
> aren't supporting it, but here is where you can get the code.

--
Shane Zatezalo
CEO Lottadot LLC
http://lottadot.com/