[pmwiki-users] Pre-announcing 2.2.0 non-beta release, new release manager

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Tue Jan 20 09:09:55 CST 2009


On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 03:35:49PM +0100, Peter Bowers wrote:
> > > one thing is probably very important: have some way to install major
> > > cookbooks from a drop down list or checkbox
> > 
> > This isn't likely to happen (the drop-down list or checkbox part),
> > because we don't want the webserver to have write permission to
> > the cookbook/ directory.
> [...]
> I think the origin of the "automatically installed cookbooks" idea was much
> more similar to what you find in scripts/authuser.php.  

We probably need a phrase other than "automatically installed cookbooks"
then.  Possibly "pre-installed recipes" or "pre-bundled recipes"
or something like that.  There are, of course, some questions:

> This is a "recipe"
> in a sense but it was approved as something that gets installed in the
> scripts/ directory instead of the cookbook/ directory but only gets turned
> on by an intentional editing of the config.php file.  

It actually goes beyond this -- authuser.php is not only "approved",
there's also a promise that in each release it's reviewed for
correct functionality and that subsequent releases will continue
to support that functionality.  It's not as if we simply took a
recipe and decided to bundle it in the core distribution -- there's
also a promise of ongoing maintenance for the future.


> My understanding of
> the "some way to install major cookbooks" idea is that these recipes would
> be installed by default when you unzipped pmwiki.zip (or whatever).  Then
> the difference between activating a script by editing config.php and
> activating it by editing a wiki page (or checking a box on a form in an
> admin page which simply updates PTVs on that page, for instance) is trivial.
> [...]
> Anyway, my point in this is just to point out that we already do this with
> pmwiki with authuser.php -- it's just a question of expanding the set of
> recipes that are included and figuring out QA procedures and etc.

Then my counter-point is that we *don't* already do this with
authuser.php, precisely because of the difference in QA procedures.
Put another way:  You've hand-waved away the hardest part of
the question.  :-)

Here are some questions that will need answering:

1.  Once a recipe is adopted into the basic distribution, 
who is responsible for maintaining that recipe and verifying
that it works with subsequent versions of PmWiki?

2.  If a new version of a recipe is published in the Cookbook,
does that imply we need an immediate new release of PmWiki
to incorporate the new version of the recipe?

3.  If we don't issue a new release, how do we manage the
mismatch between recipe versions in the cookbook versus
recipe versions in the distribution?

4.  In many cases, I don't really want this to become a 
"winner takes all" situation whereby one recipe's approach
(adopted into the distribution) tends to exclude other 
equally-worthy candidates from consideration.

Pm



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