On Feb 19, 2013, at 9:54 PM, Jason Dagit <dag...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Random thought, feel free to ignore it: Would it make sense to split 
> lambdabot up into core and contrib like is done with xmonad? Contrib could 
> contain the sillier things like bf, unlambda, show, etc and would have a 
> lower bar for contributors. Core would be the standard things and the 
> essential things.

Sounds like a good idea to me.  I could probably do that this weekend if nobody 
else does sooner.  Any opinion about whether it's better to put them in the 
same or separate actual repos?  I've tried both with different collections of 
related packages and have no strong opinion, myself.

> It seems that people don't really contribute new plugins these days but it 
> would be great if they did. For example, having a plugin for liquid types 
> would be super spiffy. Also, any plugin that helps people to reason about 
> other code (like vacuum).

I suspect there are two big reasons for that.  The biggest reason is probably 
that lambdabot has been getting long in the tooth, and the barrier to entry is 
sorting through a somewhat bit- rotted API with little to no documentation.  
That's why a lot of the work I did to clean it up for myself was API-related.

The other is that there seemed to be, for a long time, no interest in 
maintaining it.  Several years ago I did some work on fixing up some plugins, 
for example, but couldn't get a response from whoever was the current 
maintainer (I think it might have been dons, who was probably overextended at 
the time).

Hopefully the API can be further simplified and documented; if it can be 
reduced to a few well-documented "core" modules and a few auxiliary 
utility/helper ones, that would probably make the educational barrier to entry 
quite a bit lower, and I'm happy to maintain the repo or willing to let others 
do so, so hopefully we can reduce the social barrier too.  I don't currently 
have a lot of time to devote to hacking on it, but I try to be a responsive 
maintainer of all my projects.

-- James
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