Re: [Chicken-hackers] [Chicken-meisters] Let's have a roadmap, just like the grown-ups

[Imran Rafique]

On 7 September 2011 22:04, Alaric Snell-Pym <address@hidden> wrote:

>> Also, I've noticed (or think I have noticed) that users get lost in
>> the number of available eggs. Tagging, ranking or some other sort of
>> "meta"-view of the egg library might be something to think about.
>
> Yes I have been asked about this today as well. But it is so easy
> to get lost in details. Maybe we should split those "easy" parts
> up into stuff for potential newbies that can ask a "mentor" about
> stuff? I know that everyone wants to do the cool and easy stuff but
> if we take our list of priorities and look at it we may see some
> things that are solvable by someone else and that may be the beginning
> of a long....bikeshed on chicken-users...

Interesting... I wonder what the actual user story is for a typical
egg-searcher. I can imagine people wanting to find an egg that
implements an RFC, or a particular data structure... I normally just
search the eggs page in my browser and find a match in the egg name or
one-line description...

As a mere *user*, while the chicken uber-meisters (is that a proper word in German?) discuss what the typical user does - I thought I might chime in (this probably belongs on chicken-users):

The egg index is pretty nicely categorised as it is. Its certainly good enough for someone to search through, and quickly zero in on 1 or 2 (or 3) eggs of specific interest to the problem at hand.  I'm not sure what else you can really do.

Yes, its a large index. But, err - thats great. I don't see many perl coders complaining that CPAN is too big :)

Ranking eggs based on "ease of use" would be highly subjective. Probably the best thing would be to improve individual egg documentation. And yes, thats much easier said than done. Once the basic API for an egg has been documented, the thing I look for most are example code snippets, rather than verbose descriptions of how to use it. Still a pain in the neck for the egg author to do, but perhaps slightly easier than writing paragraphs of text? I wonder if most other "users" thought the same (poll?)

-- 
Regards,
       Imran Rafique