On Friday, November 26, 2004, at 12:11 PM, Terrence Brannon wrote:
I have developed a prototype magazine to be distributed by CPAN... I am also interested in volunteers who want to help in any way they want.
I think this is an interesting idea; thanks for taking the initiative.
In considering how I could effectively help, several questions occur to me:
- What do you have in mind when you say "magazine", and what lead you to select that publishing model?
I am a very module-oriented person. I have always been impressed with how Perl modules describe processes so accurately:
HTML::Seamstress->weave
HTML::TreeBuilder->look_down
DBIx::Connect->to('dev_db')
$request = new Data::Flow $recipes;However, there is little on CPAN to group a collection of related modules. I often spend time trying to get author a and author b to add each other to their SEE ALSO section. Sometimes they bristle at the request and other times they don't do it.
Ideally the overarching theme(s) behind a module might be browseable along with the module itself:
you search for DBIx::DBO2
and up comes
DBIx::Wrapper::Evaluation
for you to peruse a "Consumer Reports" evaluation of DBIx::DBO2 along with DBIx::Easy, etc... a CPAN version of those who downloaded this module also downloaded.... heheh.
Another good example is Regex::Presuf, Match::Any and by BACKPANNED Regexp::Any and a new one I believe called Regexp::Alternation all of which provide the same functionality. A nice review article evaluating the useability of these modules to build software would be useful.
- Do you envision ever creating a paper edition, or is it more akin to a collection of manpages?
manpages... then again it is POD and POD2latex POD2pdf POD2html are all there ready for the printer. but really just manpages is all I focus on.
- What's the relationship between the magazine and this mailing list?
now that's a good question. I was hoping for a process flow kind of like this. Somebody starts with a position paper written in POD (I submitted one to Alzabo earlier today and my post on conjunction of method chains was written in POD and then emailed to this list), then a number of people reply. Then the original author develops a digest. The one for that topic could be named:
Software::Design::Class::Method::Chaining::techniques
which summarizes all that was learned through the discussion process.
- What choices would lead authors to submit an article to this forum, rather than to the current choices, like Perl Monks, Perl Review, Perl.com, etc?
I think it boils down to how you like to author things and how much peer-review you want. I don't like HTML authoring so much. Writing something for intensive peer review is good, but I prefer something along the lines of comp.lang.perl.moderated in terms of how much scrutiny I want.
We also have the option of packaging working code with our articles. The HTML::Mason::vs_perl_oop distribution had working pure Perl to emulation Mason autohandling. That is easy with CPAN publishing.
Please let me know if you have any ideas about how the magazine is packaged and presented so that its contents are easily searched on CPAN.
I'll second brian's point about just packaging POD files: change the extension from .pm to .pod and strip out everything before the first =head.
Also, instead of 11_04, consider a machine-sortable date format like 200411 (or at least 04_11) so that directory indexes come out in chronological order.
Another good point. Again, search.cpan.org keeps dates for modules, so we might like to leverage that.
I really like Tim's idea of one distro per article and then create Bundles... or heck, forget the bundles.
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