Someone was recently concerned about the "alpha" status on a recipe I had posted. In looking at some other recipes (both those I've authored myself and those that others have authored) I see that there are an awful lot of recipes with a status that is a lot more conservative than the recipe probably deserves. I.e., this might be a recipe that is regularly used by dozens of sites without any problems but it still has a "beta" or even "alpha" designation.
One possible reason for this is that developers have no way of knowing how widespread the use of the recipe is. If only 2 sites are using it then the "alpha" designation is appropriate, but if 28 sites use it extensively on a daily basis and have been doing so for 6 months then probably it can be justifiably upgraded to "stable". And how would anyone know whether it is on the 2-site scale or on the 28-site scale? My question is, is there any reasonable way to collect this information? Probably asking someone to "register" every time they try out a new recipe is both unreasonable (makes it too hard) and ineffective (i.e., someone tests it and it doesn't work but they are still registered so the recipe looks better even though it should look worse). But would it be possible to do this in an alternate way? Perhaps in the script that checks for up-to-date recipes could it anonymously collect the information of which recipes are installed? Or some other way... Not only would this help developers, but administrators would also have a way of seeing which recipes were most often used (and thus most likely to be helpful, although the one doesn't necessarily imply the other). I know as a pmwiki site administrator I would be very interested in a list of "top 10 recipes" that other, more-experienced administrators are using... Any thoughts on either the value of the idea or on how it could be implemented? Maybe it's already done and I don't know about it...? -Peter _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
