Re: [Chicken-hackers] Distributed egg repo proposal

[John Gabriele]

Hi,

Not sure if I should be posting to this list, however, I thought I'd
take a chance and chime in on 2 points:

 1. *Lower Barriers to Entry*. My guess is that the absolute easiest
way for potential contributors to contribute a package is to simply
ask them to upload a tar.gz archive of their project. Supply them with
a handful of requirements, such as:

      * name format for the tar.gz file {like so},
      * inside the unpacked project dir, its directory structure
should look {like this},
      * it should contain a package meta-data file named
{such-and-such}, and the file should contain {the following sorts of
data}.

    Then the contributor would not even have to know what sort of
archiving or version control is done on the Chicken/Egg side of
things. And they could use whatever version control they like.

 2. *Documentation*. Python's
[Cheeseshop](http://cheeseshop.python.org) has a neat feature where,
if your project has html documentation, you can (manually) upload it
directly to http://packages.python.org/project-name . This way,
contributors aren't forced to use any particular source format for
their docs -- as long as they can generate html from it before
uploading [^1].

    In fact, you could go one further and require that packages
contain an `html-doc` dir with at least an index.html file in it. Then
you could trivially automate and eliminate the doc upload step.

[^1]: Incidentally, the [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/)
tool works well for converting various input doc formats to various
output doc formats (including html).

Just my opinion, but if it's as easy as pie to create and upload a
simple tar.gz package with some html docs (even if it's just a
Markdown-formatted readme converted to html), and if there's a culture
that encourages people to do so, then I think they will.

---John