On 2023-07-04 17:21, Christopher Barker wrote:
Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on these ideas (or others?) -
both technical and social.
To my mind there are two interrelated social problems that make this
task difficult:
1) Promulgating a list of "good" packages tends to make people think
packages not on the list are not good (aka "implied exhaustiveness")
2) In order to curate all or nearly all packages, you need curators with
a wide range of areas of interest and expertise (aka "breadth").
The reason these are interrelated is that once people start thinking
your list is exhaustive, it's really important to have breadth in the
curation, or else entire domains of utility can wind up having all
packages implicitly proscribed.
As an example, a few months ago I wanted to do some automated email
manipulations via IMAP. I looked at the builtin imaplib module and
found it useless, so I went looking for other things. I eventually
found one that more or less met my needs (imap_tools).
The question is, what happens when a person goes to our curated index
looking for an IMAP library? If they don't find one, does that mean
there aren't any, or there are but they're all junk, or just that there
was no curator who had any reason to explore the space of packages
available in this area? In short, it becomes difficult for a user to
decide whether a tool's *absence" from the index indicates a negative
opinion or no opinion.
There are ways around this, like adding categories (so if you see a
category you know someone at least attempted to evaluate some packages
in that category), but they can also have their own problems (like
increasing the level of work required for curation). I'm not sure what
the best solution is, but just wanted to mention this issue.
--
Brendan Barnwell
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no
path, and leave a trail."
--author unknown
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