[Snow-users-list] Snow Patrol

Jan Skibinski jan.skibinski at gmail.com
Fri Mar 2 11:49:07 EST 2007


Hi,

A very good initiative! I will certainly use it in my scheme-osa project.

Do you envision setting some sort of Snow Patrol to assure
consistency, portability and quality of the Snow packages? Is there
any grand library design concept in Snowfort, or is it intended to be
just a loose system of individual packages?

I have no idea how the self-control of package authors work in
practice in other repositories of this sort. But I wonder how Egg or
PlaneT deal with duplication of effort (for example, 10 HTTP oriented
packages, rather than one or two), or proliferation of low quality
"hello world" entries.

Jan

P.S.
To illustrate why I wonder about the latter I point to a great
democratic initiative for publishing scientific papers --  arxiv, the
repository of e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and
Quantitative Biology, http://arxiv.org/.

The idea is great and the arxiv archive has served us well for many
years. However, there are some problems with this repository, as David
Bacon, the owner of Quantum Pontiff blog
(http://dabacon.org/pontiff/?p=1418),  explains:

"... while the arxiv is a amazing tool, one of the problems was that
the volume of papers was high and, to put it bluntly, the quality of
these papers was not necessarily so great."

Consequently, he established the scirate.com site to rate the papers
(initially quant-phys), in order to filter out the noise. More details
in the article I cited, which is sort of FAQ on subject of rating,
presented rather humorously.


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